Lay your story against the shape
and see what is missing.

The setup: Establish who the protagonist is, what they want, and what normal looks like before it breaks. On the board, setup scenes sit at the front of the first section, and you can see immediately whether there are too many of them.

The inciting incident: The event that disturbs the status quo and makes the story necessary. Pin it as a marker early in act one. If the cards before it pile up past the first ten to fifteen percent of the board, your story is starting late.

The first plot point: The moment the protagonist commits and cannot go back, closing act one at roughly the 25 percent mark. On a canvas that mark is a visible boundary, so an act one that sprawls to forty percent is caught the day you lay it out.

Rising action that actually rises: Act two is roughly half the story, and it fails by flattening: a string of scenes at the same intensity. With scenes as cards you can read the escalation as a sequence and spot the stretch where nothing forces anything.

The midpoint reversal: At roughly the 50 percent mark, something changes what the protagonist wants, knows, or is willing to do. It is the hinge that keeps the long middle from sagging. Pin it at the center of the board; if your reversal is drifting toward 70 percent, the geometry says so before a reader does.

The low point: Near the end of act two the goal should look genuinely lost. Mark it as the section's closing beat and check what leads there. If the low point arrives without escalation underneath it, it reads as arbitrary, and on the board that missing staircase is plainly visible.

Subplots that survive the middle: Act two is where subplots vanish. Run each one as a track under the section and an empty stretch of track is the thread your reader will forget you started.

Climax and resolution: The final quarter: the confrontation the whole story has been arranging, then the resolution that shows the changed world. Everything in act three should be paid for earlier; connect each climax card to its setup and the unpaid debts stand out.

The whole shape at once: Three sections, roughly 25/50/25, every scene placed. This is the diagnostic view no worksheet gives you: proportions, beat placement, and scene density readable in one look.

Rearrange without retyping: Structural revision is reordering. Drag a scene from act two into act one, watch the proportions shift, and decide with the evidence in front of you instead of rewriting an outline to find out.

Arcs aligned to the turns: Character arcs turn where the structure turns: commitment at the first plot point, revelation at the midpoint, despair at the low point. Pin arc cards beside those markers and misalignment is visible.

Swap the framework with a prompt: Three acts is the most general shape, not the only one. Save the Cat, the hero's journey, seven-point, and 200-plus other frameworks are built in, so if your story wants fifteen beats instead of three acts, the AI lays out the new frame around your existing cards.

AI that sees your whole board: Ask it where act two goes flat, what could bridge two scenes, or whether the midpoint is doing enough. It uses the entire canvas as context, so the suggestions fit your story rather than a generic one. It structures; it does not write your prose.

Research and mood on the same canvas: Drag in PDFs, images, and links, grab frames from YouTube or Vimeo, and keep a moodboard for tone beside the structure. The material the story draws on stays one scroll from the scenes that need it.

Share the structure, not a summary: Send a view-only link and a writing partner, producer, or editor sees the whole shape in a browser with no account. Export as a high-quality image or PDF for anyone who wants to mark it up.