Storylines

The story organizer for writers.

Write in your favorite editor. Organize scenes, track characters, and visualize your timeline.

Beta — this app is under active development

Storylines extracts structure from your text files and gives you powerful tools to see the big picture.

Drag scenes onto a timeline, see gaps and overlaps, and compress long stretches automatically. Group by character, chapter, or subplot.

Point Storylines at a folder and it automatically detects scene boundaries, generates titles, and tracks each scene as an item.

Track who's in each scene, set point-of-view characters, and see your story from each character's perspective.

Edit chapter info, timeline dates, location, status, and links between scenes — all stored in a central YAML file alongside your files.

Edit in Ulysses, iA Writer, Word, or any text editor. Hit sync and Storylines picks up your changes instantly.

Your files stay untouched. Metadata lives in a single _storylines.yaml file. Everything is readable without the app.

Select the folder where your text files live. Storylines reads them directly — nothing is uploaded.

Storylines analyzes your text, finds scene boundaries, and creates an item for each scene with a generated title.

Add timeline dates, characters, chapters, locations, and status to each scene. Everything is stored in _storylines.yaml next to your files.

Switch between list and timeline views. Drag events, draw links between scenes, merge or split items as your story evolves.

Free to use. No credit card required.

Requires a Chromium-based browser (Chrome, Edge, Arc, Opera) for local file access.