Chapter 29 · The Project
The Outline Board
The outline board is where a story gets planned before it gets written, and where the plan gets corrected once the pages start arguing back. It holds the same outline two ways: as beat cards you can shuffle, and as a treatment you can write out in prose. Neither one is the master copy, and neither updates the other until you ask.
Opening the board
Open a project and the outline sits under Step 1 · Develop as the tool
called Outline, described as "Beat cards and a long-form treatment". The chip on
that tile tells you what is inside without opening it: a beat count, treatment once
the prose side has anything in it, or empty.
The editor has a second door. The navigator down the left of the writing screen ends with a Beat board → button. That navigator, headed Outline for prose and Scenes for a screenplay, is a different thing: it lists the headings and sluglines already in the document you are editing. The board is the plan; the navigator is the draft's own table of contents.
Every project has one outline board, and it belongs to the project rather than to any one document. A series shares a single board across all its episodes, the same way it shares one Story Bible.
Beat cards
The Beat cards tab is one column of cards, each holding a title and a short synopsis. + Add card puts a new one at the bottom and drops the cursor into its title, so a run of beats can be typed without touching the mouse.
Each card's header carries a grip on the left, a status button in the middle, and a × on the right that deletes it. Typing anywhere in a card saves it a moment after you stop, so there is no save button and nothing to remember.
Deleting asks "Delete this card?" and, once confirmed, the card is gone. Beat cards are not
covered by the version history that protects your documents, so a deleted card cannot be
restored. When a beat might still be useful, cycle it back to idea and drag it to the
bottom instead.
Status and order
The status button cycles through three values, one click at a time, and wraps around:
| Status | What it usually means |
|---|---|
idea | A beat you have thought of. The status every new card starts on. |
draft | Written, or being written, in the manuscript. |
done | Finished to your satisfaction. Shown filled in, so a scan down the board shows how much of the plan has become prose. |
Nothing enforces these. Storskarvia does not read your manuscript to decide whether a beat has been drafted. The status is a note you keep for yourself.
Drag a card to reorder the board, and the new order saves as soon as you let go. Dragging uses the browser's own drag and drop, which needs a mouse or a trackpad, so a phone or tablet will not pick a card up. Edit cards on a touch screen, then reorder them at a computer.
The treatment
The Treatment tab is the same outline written out as prose. It is one long editable page with two kinds of block, and the two buttons on the left of the bar set which one the current line is:
- Section makes the line a heading. A heading marks a beat.
- Body makes it an ordinary paragraph. The paragraphs under a heading are that beat's detail.
Pressing Enter at the end of a heading drops you into a body paragraph, since that is almost always what comes next. The line under the page reads "Saved to your project." and changes to "Saving…" while a change is on its way.
The treatment stores headings, paragraphs, and their text. Bold, italics, links, and images are not kept, so pasting formatted text brings the words and leaves the styling behind. The treatment is a plan you will rewrite many times, and the manuscript is where formatting belongs.
Which tab you were last on is remembered per project, so a project you outline in prose opens on the treatment next time.
Moving between the two
The cards and the treatment never update each other on their own. Two buttons on the treatment bar move work across when you decide to:
- "⇱ Pull beats in" builds the treatment from the board. Each card becomes a Section heading, and its synopsis becomes the paragraph under it. If the treatment already has writing in it, you are asked to type R to replace what is there or A to append the beats to the end. Anything else, including cancelling, leaves the treatment untouched. With no cards on the board yet, you get "No beat cards yet — add a few cards first."
- "⇲ Send sections to cards" goes the other way, and it is careful. A section whose heading matches an existing card's title updates that card, a heading with no match is added as a new card at the end, and cards the treatment says nothing about are left alone. Nothing is ever deleted. When it finishes, the line beside the tabs reports how many were added and how many updated.
Two consequences worth knowing. Matching is by title, ignoring case, so renaming a beat in the treatment produces a new card and leaves the old one on the board for you to remove by hand. And an updated card has its synopsis replaced by the treatment's, so detail you added on the card and never wrote into the treatment is overwritten. When the card holds the better version, pull beats in first and send them back afterwards.
A treatment with no Section headings has nothing to send, and says so: "Add at least one Section heading to the treatment first."
Focus mode
The Focus button at the right of the tab row clears the page down to the outline itself. The header, footer, page title, and explanatory lines all go, and a small Exit focus · Esc pill appears at the top right. Press Esc or click the pill to come back.
The view tabs stay, faded until you point at them, because cards and treatment are two halves of one outline and writers cross between them mid-thought. It is the same focus mode, the same pill, and the same Esc as the editor's, covered in Chapter 12.
What the board will not do
Storskarvia never writes a word for you, and the outline board is the plainest example of that rule in the application. No button generates beats, expands a synopsis, or turns a treatment into chapters. Every card on the board is one you typed.
The board is also not wired to your manuscript. A card is not linked to a document, dragging
one does not reorder your chapters, and marking a beat done changes nothing but the
colour of a button. Document order lives in the project binder. For how much structure is worth
having before you draft, How to Outline a Novel is
the longer argument.
A few sizes are capped quietly: a card title stops at 200 characters, a synopsis at 4,000, and one press of "Send sections to cards" carries at most 500 sections.
When something goes wrong
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| "Could not save — retrying…" under the treatment | Storskarvia could not be reached, or your sign-in expired. It retries every few seconds on its own. If it persists, copy your recent paragraphs somewhere safe and reload the page. |
| Card edits that vanish on reload | The same cause, without the warning: cards save quietly and do not report a failure. After a long session left open overnight, make one small treatment edit and watch for "Saved to your project." before trusting the board. |
| "Sync failed — please try again." | The send to cards did not complete. No cards were changed. Try it again once the connection is back. |
| "Project not found" | The project belongs to another account, or it has been deleted. Outline boards are not shared by a document share link. |
| Duplicate cards after a sync | A heading was renamed between syncs. Both the old and new card exist on purpose. Delete the one you no longer want. |
With the shape of the story settled, the next readers are the ones who never tire: the fact-checker, the continuity editor, and the Skeptic, in Part VI.
Updated 2026-09-05 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?