Bring Your Ideas To Life.
Starting a book is like embarking upon a long journey. You’ll need a solid plan – a roadmap – to get where you want to go.
Like most writers, you’ve likely got too many ideas fluttering around on scraps of paper and tumbling around that head of yours. Charting them out with visual tools provides both insights and inspiration while keeping your project on track.
The Thinkboard: Giving Shape To Your Story.
The Thinkboard is where your imagination can take shape. Jot down ideas, characters, and locations with just one click. Make clusters, draw connections, and watch your story come together.
Using the Thinkboard replaces messy notes, index cards, and cluttered corkboards. It’s like a mind map, but more flexible and powerful.
Ideas take form on the Thinkboard
To get started, just click on a blank area of a Thinkboard. A box will pop up where you can note down your idea. New boxes emerge with every click, just like pinned notes or index cards. To connect two boxes, just drag one onto the other and a link will appear.
In this way, your story takes shape organically, with relationships, character motivations, and background information visible at a glance.
Add colors or icons to deepen the context. Do two characters fall in love? Connect them with a heart. Are they sworn enemies? Add a gun icon to signal their impending confrontation.
Like all Papyrus tools, the Thinkboard is directly linked to your manuscript. Anything from the Thinkboard can be copied into your text by dragging and dropping. Groupings will automatically become chapters or scenes, while idea boxes become running text.
That’s how easy it is to move from idea planning to actual book writing. Rather than staring down an intimidating, blank page, you begin with building blocks from your ideas.
The Timeline: Keeping Your Sequence Straight.
The Timeline lets you stay cool and in control as your story expands and the chapters multiply. Epic plotlines, flashbacks, pacing jumps, and backstory can all be managed easily with this intuitive visual tool.
Use the Timeline to sequence your story and to decide when and how action plays out. Chapters 
, scenes 
, and events 
are displayed along a time axis, color coordinated for optimum comprehension.
No matter how big your story gets, you always hold the reins.
Chapters (green) and scenes (yellow) on different story arcs
Chapters (colored green), scenes (yellow), and events (red lines) are displayed along a horizontal time axis in the order that they occur in your story. They are assigned to differently colored story threads (such as backstory and flashbacks), which are displayed one beneath the other. This prevents overlaps in parallel actions and flashbacks.
The Timeline is fully adjustable to your story’s pacing. One sequence might take place over an action-packed hour, while the next chapter begins a year into the future. Expand or compress your timescale with your mouse.
You can also create new chapters, scenes, and events directly within the Timeline, or delete redundant elements.
Timeline threads in the Organizer
A compressed time gap between two chapters
Information from your Timeline (chapter start and end dates, for example) is automatically linked with other Papyrus tools, such as the Navigator and Organizer. All the details you need are always at your fingertips.
Bestselling Author Andreas Eschbach
Ben Brown
Claudia Winter
Thomas Sand
Bernhard Hennen