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How to Use Plot Threads

The IlorisNovel TeamJuly 18, 2026

This walks through Plot Threads from an empty canvas to a mapped story. For what the feature is and when it's worth using, start with What are plot threads?.

Open your story and click Plot Threads in the tabs across the top.

1. Create a thread

An empty canvas offers one thing: Create Timeline Track. Click it and you get a track named "New Narrative Arc."

Click the title to rename it. Name it after the storyline, not the chapter — "Kess and the Envoy," not "Chapters 4-11." A thread is a storyline; chapters are how you deliver it.

Give each thread its own colour. That's what makes the whole canvas readable at a glance later.

Make one track per storyline you're actually carrying. Three to six is normal for a long serial. Twenty tracks is a picture as hard to read as the story.

2. Add events

Each track has a + button. Each event gets:

  • A title — the beat. "She lies about the ring."
  • An icon and colour — for scanning.
  • A description — as long as you want, formatted like a chapter. Room for how the scene should go, what it needs to accomplish, what you haven't figured out yet.

Write beats, not summaries. "They meet" is a beat. "Chapter 7" is a container — and since events don't link to chapters, naming them after chapters gives you a list that goes stale the moment you reorder anything.

3. Nest sub-events

Any event can hold sub-events, via the + on the event itself.

Use this when a beat is really a sequence. "The Siege of Aldmere" is one beat at the arc level and five scenes when you're drafting it. Keep the top level readable and push detail down.

4. Reorder

Drag events along a track to reorder them. Order is the sequence of the arc, and it's yours to state — nothing infers it from your chapters.

5. Reference your Wiki

Inside an event's description, type @ to mention a Wiki entry. Useful when a beat turns on a specific character or object and you want the two connected.

Reading the canvas

Once a few threads have beats, the canvas earns its keep — not by telling you anything, but by letting you see it.

Scan across. A track with nothing recent is a storyline that's gone quiet. Beats stacked in one column are arcs colliding in the same stretch of story. A track that stops is a thread you dropped.

Nothing flags any of this. You're looking at your own story from above, which is the thing that's hard to do from inside chapter 41.

Re-read the canvas when you come back from a break. It reloads the whole story in about a minute, which is the single best reason to keep it current.

Things to know

  • Threads can't be deleted from the canvas right now. You can create and rename them, and you can delete individual events, but there's no way to remove a whole track. Worth knowing before you make twenty. If you have one you want gone, contact us and we'll clear it.
  • Events don't connect to chapters. Nothing links a beat to the chapter that delivers it, and nothing marks a thread resolved. The canvas is a picture you maintain, not a checklist that watches you.
  • Nothing here is visible to readers. Plot Threads is entirely private. Safe for spoilers, endings, and ideas you haven't committed to.

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