Novel-writing software for a story that has to stay connected.

It began as a list of what my tools would not do

I’m Allen, and before I built Tabularia I was outlining The Fathom, a fantasy that will run to five volumes, in Scrivener while drafting notes for it in a separate notes app. Somewhere in that I started a document of everything the pair could not do for me. It wanted a summary and comments on every part of the book. It wanted snapshots I could compare, search that knew it was searching a novel, and timelines. Above all, it wanted the whole series in one place, kept apart from the rest of my life’s notes. Tabularia grew out of that list.

A novel is one manuscript

A chapter gets its own row in the Outline without becoming its own file. The book runs as one composition from the first page to the last, and you reach any part of it from the Outline, the minimap, or search.

Narrow the Working Scope to one scene when that scene is the day’s work. Widen it and the novel is back around it. Nothing has to be stitched together at the end, and the plan cannot quietly drift away from the draft while you write.

A shape to start from

Jack M. Bickham told writers not to “wander around in a fog,” and his cure was to plan ahead. One way to do that is a summary of no more than 150 words for the series, then for each book and each chapter, with a premise for every volume: James N. Frey’s character, through conflict, to conclusion. Those summaries need a home that is not a second document. Every Book, Act, and Chapter row in the Outline carries a comment. The Outline and the timeline drawer both show it. Rename the part and the comment stays put.

A new project can also open on a story structure, Hero’s Journey and a romance beat sheet among them. Choosing one seeds the Acts and Chapters, notes what each part is for, and lays the beats through the manuscript as anchors on a timeline of their own. A Series seeds its Acts and Chapters per Book, but spreads the beats across all the Books on one timeline. So a twelve-stage journey can take five volumes to finish.

Want the same pattern repeated inside one volume? Set the Working Scope to that Book, create an empty timeline, and fill it from a shape; the beats land within that Book alone. The same route works for a writer who found the shape halfway through the draft. Nothing is written into the prose, and every part a shape made can be renamed, reordered, or deleted. The shapes guide lists what each one includes.

Follow character and plot threads through the words

Chris Roerden’s continuity advice is to enter every event on a real calendar, with where each character is at the time, and to check the manuscript against it as you revise. Romance tends to cover less than a year, and a volume of a long series may cover about that much. Keeping one year straight is work. Keeping five is a job.

To be plain about it, a Timeline in Tabularia is not that calendar. It is a named strand drawn along the manuscript itself: one for the plot, one for each viewpoint character, one for a promise the opening makes. Its markers point at the passages that carry the strand. A character’s timeline therefore shows where she is on the page and how far apart her appearances fall, and a heroine who is missing for eleven chapters shows up as an empty stretch in her lane.

The dates and the whereabouts are yours to write down. A marker’s comment is the place for what has to be true by that point: the day, the place, who is where. Because markers hold their places through anchors, rewriting a passage carries its note along. Pin one timeline as the Working Scope and the canvas closes up to that strand alone, so a character’s passages can be read end to end and checked against the dates you left on them.

Try the version before you choose it

Frey’s test for a scene whose viewpoint is in doubt is to ask who can tell it best. Then write it from several viewpoints, leave the versions alone for a few days, and pick one. That means several live copies of a single scene.

A Draft holds another version of anything from one paragraph to the whole manuscript, and nothing is overwritten while you decide. Capture the scene once for each viewpoint and write each version inside its own draft. Two Scene drafts of one scene never show at once, so switching between them means reading the scene where it sits, with the chapter running on around it. When the few days are up, merge the winner a difference at a time or all at once. Archive the others; their wording is kept.

Snapshots hold the revision points you may want again. Restoring one takes a snapshot of where you stand first, so going back costs nothing you wrote afterward.

A series can stay one work

Five volumes is a lot of book. Add another Book and it takes its place in order inside the same Manuscript. Search, the timelines, and the Outline all reach across the series. A name you spelled one way in the first volume can be found in the fourth without opening another file.

Each Book still keeps its own front and back matter and its own publication details. It numbers its pages from 1, too, so volume three does not open on page 1,100.

The page belongs to the book from the beginning

Some choices about a novel are design choices, and they come up while you write. Do the chapters have titles, or only numbers? Where does the map go: one region cropped and set inside the chapter that travels there, or the whole map on the first page where nobody looks at it? Does the first paragraph after a chapter heading sit flush?

A chapter heading in Tabularia is your own text, and its number is counted for you, so moving a chapter renumbers everything after it and leaves every title alone. A picture placed on a page stays on that page as the prose reflows around it, or sits behind the text as a full-page plate. Indent opening paragraphs decides whether the first paragraph after a chapter heading or a scene break takes the indent, and every preset but the two submission sizes sets it flush, as trade books do. The drop caps, the ornaments at a scene break, and the front and back matter belong to the Book too.

From the draft you have to the book you finish

Bring an existing novel with the import guide, explore the product tour, or compare the Local and Cloud plans on the Pricing page.