Stories

Edit Home View Content

Most of what the Home view shows comes from your story's details: its Title, Genre, Logline and so on, the things you'd list if the story appeared somewhere.

To edit them from the Home view:

1. Point at an item. If you can edit it, a soft highlight appears behind it.

1. Click it. The Edit Window opens with your story's details, that item's field among them.

1. Make your changes. They save as you go.
2. Click anywhere outside the Edit Window, or press Esc, to close it.

Only the story's owner and editors can edit these details.

Add a Primary Image

A story can have many images. Its Primary image is the background of the Home view and the story's thumbnail in My Stories. If no image is primary, the first one is used.

In the Home view there's a shortcut: Add Primary Image (or Change Primary Image, once the story has an image) at the bottom of the left column opens the image window straight away. The first image you pick becomes the primary image; any others you pick join the story's Images, and so do the earlier ones. To remove an image, use the steps below.

1. In the Home view, click any of the story's details, its title for instance, to open its Edit Window.
2. In the Images section, click the + tile, and pick or upload an image. You can add as many as you like.
3. Click an image's thumbnail to open it above the strip, then click the star (Make primary). The image is marked Primary.

You can also click the star that appears when you point at a thumbnail. Replace swaps the image for another, and the trash can (Remove) removes it.

Change Story Structure

A story's structure is its list of acts. Each template starts with one, and you can switch to another structure at any time, or copy the current one and make it your own. Both happen in the Structure tab of Advanced Settings, which the story's owner and editors can open on a computer (not on a phone). See Advanced Settings for the rest of the dialog.

Switching to a Different Structure

1. Click the Menu button in the view's header and choose Advanced Settings….
2. Open the Structure tab. It shows your current structure and its acts.

1. Click Change Structure at the top left.
2. Click a structure to read about it, or click Switch To on its card.

1. Click Save.

The new structure applies straight away, and Settings updated appears. If you change your mind, Undo in the header takes the whole change back in one step.

Your scenes keep their order. Scenes in the beginning, middle and end of the story stay in the beginning, middle and end of the new structure, spread roughly evenly across its acts there. A structure with no acts in the last part of the story takes those scenes into its last act. To put a scene in a different act, see Adjust Act Boundaries.

Customizing a Structure

1. Click the Menu button in the view's header and choose Advanced Settings….
2. Open the Structure tab.
3. Click Copy Structure below the current structure.

The copy becomes your story's structure, and you can edit it:

• Title and description: click them at the left and type.
• Acts: drag the New Act chip into the list to add an act, and drag an act by its handle to reorder. A structure needs at least three acts; with more, an act's ⋯ menu offers Remove Act, which keeps the act's scenes.
• Names: choose Edit Details… in an act's ⋯ menu to rename it in Act Name. Or turn on Auto Label to number the acts for you, with a word of your own before the number (Chapter 1, Chapter 2…) in Roman Numerals or Numbers.
• Colors: pick one under Change Color in an act's ⋯ menu.
• Tooltips: in Edit Details…, the Tooltip field holds guidance for writing the act. It shows when you point at the ⓘ beside the act's name in the Cards view.

1. Click Save. The changes apply straight away.

Adding, removing or reordering the acts of the structure your story uses changes the structure, so on Save your scenes are spread across the acts again, as when you switch structures. Renaming, colors, tooltips and Auto Label leave your scenes where they are.

Your copies stay in the list of structures. You can switch back to one later, or remove one you're not using with Delete.

Adjust Act Boundaries

There's no handle to drag between two acts. To change which act a scene belongs to, move the scene itself:

1. In the Timeline or Cards view, or the Page view's Overview, click and hold the scene.
2. Drag it into the other act. At the boundary between two acts, move slightly left or right (up or down in the Page view's Overview): the line's caps point into the act that will get the scene.
3. Let go.

To move a run of scenes across at once, select them first (Cmd + click, or Ctrl + click on Windows) and drag any one of them. An act with no scenes takes a scene dropped onto it. Move a Scene has the details.

This is handy after switching structures, when scenes don't always land in the act you want.