PlotArchitect — updated walkthrough
Actual app captures. Fictional example. Controlled demonstration responses. AI narration.

Meet PlotArchitect
PlotArchitect helps you develop the premise before you commit to a chapter outline. The refreshed app keeps your story brief, alternative premises, and approved direction in a saved book workspace. This walkthrough uses The Ash Door, a fictional example inside the actual app. The demonstration response is controlled, and the narration is AI generated. Your own model responses will vary. Start by naming the book you want to work on.

Set your boundaries
Add your rough story notes, genre, tone, and reader promise. Use the boundaries field for established facts and the ending you want to preserve. Here, Mara wants a ledger that could clear her name, but ultimately burns the evidence to save Elias. We have not established a romance, so the brief says that explicitly. AI drafting uses the same provider and model controls as TeaserPro. Manual editing needs no API key.

Develop the story logic
Develop new alternative creates a separate draft and keeps your earlier premises. Read the protagonist, concrete goal, active opposition, stakes, and costly choice. Then review the cause-and-effect spine. Mara’s theft draws the warden to Elias; trusting him makes them both targets; saving him costs her the proof. These are editable fields, and added details stay labeled as proposals. The job here is to clarify the story’s engine, not generate a full chapter plan.

Compare alternatives
Duplicate an alternative to explore another emphasis manually, or use Revise into new alternative for an AI revision that preserves the source. Name each option so you can tell them apart. Compare saved alternatives puts the premise, goal, opposition, stakes, choice, and ending side by side. In our second version, getting Elias out becomes part of Mara’s explicit goal. Both versions remain available. Choose the direction that fits the story you want to tell.

Review positioning drafts
The story-positioning section retains the earlier tool’s promotional features: tropes and reader promise, a signature scene, the central dilemma, visual direction, a TikTok caption, and an X thread. Treat these as drafts. Check that the tropes are supported and that public captions do not reveal your ending. Visual direction can travel into TeaserPro by copying it, but no images are generated here. The app does not promise virality or publish social posts for you.

Approve deliberately
Once you have reviewed the story facts, ending, and proposed additions, approve the selected premise. Approval keeps a snapshot separate from working drafts. Editing that approved alternative makes its approval stale, so you must review and approve again before handing it off. Editing another alternative does not change the approved one. Save a version before a major change, and use Restore version to recover the earlier workspace when needed.

Take it into an outline
Export approved planning brief creates a JSON file for Outline Expander. In Outline Expander, use Import backup or PlotArchitect brief. The import opens a new book with the premise, story logic, ending, and boundaries as its brief. Existing outlines stay intact, and chapter generation is a separate action. Outline Expander is optional and requires its own access. You can also export the selected premise as Markdown and use it with any planning workflow.

Save and reuse your work
PlotArchitect autosaves in this browser. Download backup keeps a portable copy, and importing a backup opens a separate book workspace. Copy approved to active Book DNA is an explicit action: confirm the active project before replacing its premise and related fields. Generation no longer does this automatically. Open the refreshed app through your existing standalone purchase or member access. Find the updated screenshots and guide at darkling collective store dot com slash plotarchitect.