Papyrus Author helps you realize your ideas.

Within the Thinkboard you capture your first thoughts and ideas and gradually build up the structure of your story.

The Timeline lets you plan the chronology of your story threads with their chapters and scenes.

That’s not all–Tools like the Organizer and the Character Database work in close cooperation with the Thinkboard and Timeline.

The Thinkboard–You Won’t Need Your Cork Board Anymore

To create a coherent story, writers need a tool to connect their ideas, characters and locations.

One of the classics was the cork wall, littered with index cards, connected with coloured wool threads.

Papyrus Author offers you the »Thinkboard«. Here your imagination takes shape, your ideas grow in mutual context. Create, rearrange and group anything you can think of your story. The result is similar to a mindmap, but more flexible and powerful.

How do you take your first steps in the Thinkboard? Just click into the free space of a new Thinkboard and write down an idea. Then another, and another. New boxes emerge–just like pinned notes or index cards.

If you want to create a relation, you just drag one idea box onto another, and a link will appear. Just like a thread.

Do these two characters love another? Do they want to kill each other? You can choose status icons for the links or the idea boxes themselves (a heart for a loving relationship, or a hatchet or gun for a violent encounter, for example). Put your ideas into groups if they belong in the same context.

Your story will take shape organically, with relationships, influences and background information, until your plot is perfect.

Since this work should result in a book, the Thinkboard is (like all Papyrus Author tools) connected directly to your text. Everything you create in the Thinkboard can be dragged into your text with your mouse. Groups will automatically become chapters or scenes, while idea boxes will become running text. You can then seamlessly develop them further and continue writing real text.

That’s how easy it is to move from idea planning to actual book writing. Your text will not start with an empty page, but with the building blocks from your first ideas.

Plotting with the Thinkboard takes you a great step closer to the finished story.

The Timeline–Always on Time

The Timeline gives you control over the temporal coherence of your story. It presents your chapters and scenes in chronological order alongside a time axis. This might not be the same as the reading order, since your book could include flashbacks, time lapses, etc. You use the Timeline to sequence your story and to decide when and how your chapters, scenes and events play out and which follows which.

This chronological chapter overview is also used to plan your new chapters (together with the Thinkboard and Organizer). You can directly create new chapters , scenes and events within the Timeline, or delete redundant elements.

The time data you enter is linked to your real chapters and scenes in the text. As always with the Papyrus planning tools, you have a direct hold on the elements that will flow into the progress of your story.

But how does the Timeline work?

Chapters, scenes and events (red lines) are displayed at the times they occur. They are assigned to story threads (grey, blue, orange), which are shown one underneath the other. This prevents overlaps in parallel actions and flashbacks.

To treat empty areas over years of inactivity, you can compress the timescale to avoid large gaps.

Papyrus Author’s Timeline is the tool you use to make time flow consistent and logical throughout your story–including parallel threads and flashbacks. Everything is under your control.