🚀 Plan your project in Novlr

Cards on a corkboard. Tabs in a spreadsheet. Sticky notes on the fridge. Writers have always found ways to keep a plot straight, but the plan usually ends up living somewhere separate from the manuscript itself, and every time the story changes, the two drift further apart.

From today, planning lives inside Novlr: a plotting grid built directly into every project.

The grid method

Every scene, beat, or reminder is a note pinned to a section. Read across a row and you follow a single thread as it travels through your book. Read down a column and you see everything included in that section. Empty cells show you the gaps and crowded ones show you where pacing might need work.

The Planning tab sits in every project, between the Overview and Manuscript tavsm and it's included on every plan — including Free, with no limit on how many ideas you can track.

Open the Planning tab

The first time you open the Planning tab in a project, Novlr lays the grid out for you: every section and subsection of your manuscript becomes a column, with its live word count in the header, and you get two starter rows — Main Plot and Secondary Plot — ready to rename or extend.

One heads-up for longtime Novlr writers: Outline notes have been renamed Planning notes, and any you'd already pinned to a chapter will already be sitting in the grid for you.

Make the rows yours

Rows are throughlines. Click a label to rename it, hover over a row separator for a + to add another, and drag to reorder. Use rows for anything from an A or a B plot, a character's point of view, a timeline in a dual narrative, clues and red herrings in a mystery, or foreshadowing you'd otherwise forget.

Fill the grid

Every cell has a + button. Click it to create a Planning note, give it a title, and write as much as the beat needs. It's linked to that section, so it's waiting in the notes sidebar the moment you open that section to write.

Planning notes are notes like any other, so you'll also find them in your Notebook and Note Library, filtered as hidden by default so they don't crowd your view. Notes created in the grid pick up their row's name as a tag automatically.

Drag and drop until it flows

Cards are draggable within a cell to reorder beats, or across the grid to move an idea from one section to another. Every move is reflected into your manuscript.

Columns are your section. Hover between two headers for a + to slot in a new section on the spot, click a title to rename it, or grab a column's grip to drag whole sections. Subsections travel with their parent, and a live label tells you what's about to happen before you drop. No copy and paste required.

A holding pen for homeless ideas

An Unassigned tray at the bottom holds Planning notes that don't have a place yet or you're not sure you can make work yet. Drag a card down to shelve it, and back up when you're ready. Notes from archived section land here too, and slot back into place if you unarchive.

Plan from anywhere

On phone, the grid becomes a section-at-a-time view with collapsible plot lines and a "Move to..." option. Tablets get the full grid with touch drag. On desktop, the whole thing also works with just a keyboard and screen reader.