One card per chapter.
The whole book in view.

Storyflow is built for exactly this job: every chapter is one card on a canvas, and you change the order of the book by dragging. With all the cards in view, you can read pacing, point of view and length across the whole book at once. The AI builds a first outline from a prompt and uses your whole board as context, with research and characters beside the chapters.

Per chapter: purpose, content, point of view, position in the structure, length, and connections to other chapters. For fiction, content means the scenes and what changes by the end. For nonfiction, it means the claim the chapter makes, the evidence behind it, and what the reader gains. The two entries writers most often skip are purpose and length, and they are the two that make an outline diagnostic rather than descriptive. A chapter without a purpose is a candidate for cutting, and chapter lengths laid side by side reveal pacing problems that reading cannot.

There is no correct number, and chasing one is a distraction. Most commercial fiction runs somewhere between two and five thousand words per chapter, thrillers often much shorter, literary fiction often longer, and nonfiction chapters commonly run four to eight thousand. What matters more than the average is the variation, because chapter length is a pacing instrument. A run of short chapters accelerates, a long one slows and deepens. The useful question is not whether your chapters are the right length but whether their lengths are doing something deliberate, which you can only answer by seeing them all at once.

Not during early access. Storyflow is paid-only right now, with plans starting at $9.99 a month, and a Free plan for solo use launches before the end of 2026. Anyone a paid member invites to a board joins free today, so a co-author or critique partner can join without paying. If you want a free option this minute, Google Docs and a table will do a basic chapter outline perfectly well, and index cards on a table remain genuinely excellent for a first pass.

Both are legitimate and they solve different problems. Outlining first suits writers who want the structure settled before the prose, and it is much cheaper to find a broken second act in an outline than in a finished draft. Outlining after suits discovery writers, and it is genuinely useful: card out the draft you have, one card per chapter, and the shape of what you wrote becomes visible along with what it needs. Many writers do both, outlining loosely before and re-outlining the actual draft before revisions. The second pass is often the more valuable one.

Yes, and nonfiction outlining benefits from a canvas more than fiction does. Each chapter card carries the argument it makes, the evidence supporting it, and the takeaway for the reader. Put your research clusters on the same canvas next to the chapters that use them, and a chapter with no evidence beside it tells you where the work is. This also makes the book proposal easier, since the chapter outline a publisher wants is essentially this board written out.

Yes, and it is one of the most useful things to see across a whole book. Mark the viewpoint on each chapter card and the pattern becomes visible immediately: whether narrators alternate cleanly or clump, whether one viewpoint disappears for a long stretch, and whether the character who opens the book is the one who closes it. Multi-viewpoint novels fail in this specific way more than any other, and it is nearly impossible to spot while reading the manuscript in order.

Yes, and making reordering cheap is much of the point. Chapter cards move with a drag, so trying an order costs seconds rather than a retyping job. Because it is cheap you will actually test three arrangements instead of defending the first one, which is usually where outlines improve. The structure around the cards, including character tracks and research clusters, stays visible while you move things, so you can see the consequences of a reorder rather than guessing at them.

There is a built-in document editor, so you can draft beside the outline board, and some writers work that way for chapter-level drafting with the structure visible next to them. Storyflow's strength is planning and structure rather than long-form manuscript management, so many authors outline here and draft in Scrivener, Word, or Google Docs with the canvas open as the map. Sharing a view-only link with an editor during revisions works regardless of where the prose lives.

Yes. Share a view-only link and they open the whole chapter structure in a browser with no account. For a developmental editor or an agent considering a proposal, seeing the structure laid out is often more informative than reading sample chapters, because it shows whether the book has a shape. If they want something to mark up or circulate, export the board as a high-quality image or PDF, and the live link keeps updating as you revise.