Skip to content
plotTree

Introduction

What is plotTree?

plotTree is an AI-powered story development platform that helps writers transform ideas into complete narratives through structured decomposition and procedural generation. Think of it as a framework for taking a vague concept like “a detective solves mysteries in space” and systematically developing it into a full story with consistent characters, dynamic pacing, and coherent world-building.

Unlike traditional writing tools that give you a blank page and wish you luck, plotTree provides a structured workflow that breaks down the overwhelming task of writing a complete story into manageable, sequential steps. You’re still doing the creative work—plotTree just helps you organize it and keeps track of all the moving pieces.

The Core Problem

Writing a complete story is cognitively demanding. You need to:

  • Maintain consistency across characters, locations, and objects as they evolve
  • Track how story elements change from scene to scene
  • Balance pacing so your story doesn’t drag in the middle or rush the ending
  • Apply narrative structure without getting lost in frameworks and beat sheets
  • Remember what you wrote three chapters ago about that minor character who’s suddenly important

plotTree handles the bookkeeping so you can focus on the actual storytelling.

How It Works: The Hierarchy

plotTree organizes stories into a hierarchical structure that mirrors how narratives actually work:

StoryProject → PlotLines → Scenes → Chapters (optional)

StoryProject

The root container for your entire narrative. This is where you define:

  • High-level metadata (title, genre, format, word count targets)
  • Overall theme and plot overview
  • Narrative perspective (first person, third person limited, etc.)
  • Which storytelling framework you’re using (Three-Act Structure, Hero’s Journey, etc.)

PlotLines

The narrative thread(s) of your story. Currently, each project has one plotline (multiple plotlines for subplots and character arcs are a future enhancement). The plotline is structured by your chosen framework, which provides:

  • Sections: Extended development phases (Setup, Rising Action, Resolution)
  • Milestones: Significant story beats that occur at specific points (Theme Stated, Character Introduction)
  • Transitions: Structural pivot points that drive major changes (Inciting Incident, Climax)

Think of frameworks as scaffolding—they give you structural guidance without dictating your specific story.

Scenes

The primary content unit and where the actual storytelling happens. Scenes progress through three statuses:

  1. Draft: Initial planning (purpose, conflict, resolution, key moments)
  2. Expanded: AI-enriched metadata (scene type, intensity, complexity) with calculated word count targets
  3. Written: Final narrative content with full state tracking

Scenes are the workhorses of plotTree. They’re where AI analyzes your plans, calculates pacing, generates content, and tracks how your story elements evolve.

Chapters

Organizational groupings of contiguous scenes for longer works. These provide reader-friendly divisions without constraining how you develop individual scenes. Optional, but helpful for novels and longer narratives.

The Story Vault: State Tracking That Actually Works

The Story Vault is plotTree’s answer to the eternal writer’s question: “Wait, did I say Sarah was 32 or 34? And is she still mad at her brother?”

It automatically tracks:

  • Characters: Names, ages, occupations, personality traits, relationships
  • Locations: Descriptions, atmosphere, significance
  • Items: Properties, ownership, narrative importance
  • And more: Magic systems, organizations, factions, cultural elements

Here’s where it gets clever: the Vault doesn’t just store static information. It tracks how things change over time through VaultObjectStates—snapshots of each element at specific scene boundaries.

When you write Scene 5, plotTree looks at the VaultObjectStates from Scene 4 and uses those as the starting point. This creates a history of how your characters, locations, and items evolve throughout the story. No more continuity errors (well, fewer continuity errors).

Automatic Detection

As you create scenes, AI automatically:

  • Detects mentions of characters, locations, and items
  • Matches them to existing vault objects using fuzzy matching (handles nicknames and variations)
  • Enriches new objects with detailed attributes
  • Either auto-generates vault objects or flags them for your review (configurable)

You can let AI handle the tedious tracking work, or review and approve everything manually. Your choice.

AI Integration: Tools, Not Replacements

plotTree uses AI in three main ways:

1. Content Generation

AI generates scene content based on your planning, but it’s always guided by your decisions. You define the purpose, conflict, and resolution—AI writes the prose. You can regenerate, edit, or completely rewrite anything it produces.

2. Analysis and Enrichment

AI analyzes your scene plans to categorize them (action vs. dialogue, high vs. low intensity) and calculate appropriate word count targets using a rule-based pacing system. This ensures your action scenes are punchy and your character moments have room to breathe.

3. Conversational Assistance

Two specialized AI assistants are available:

  • General Assistant: Cross-project writing support, can create new projects
  • Project Assistant: Project-specific guidance with full access to your vault and scenes

These are optional. If you prefer clicking buttons in a UI, you can ignore the chat entirely.

Timeline View: See Your Entire Story at a Glance

The Timeline is your story’s visual map—a single view where you can see everything from the opening scene to the final resolution. It’s where planning, content, and character evolution all come together.

What the Timeline Shows You

Story Structure: Your chosen framework’s sections, milestones, and transitions are laid out visually. You can see exactly where the inciting incident hits, where the midpoint twist occurs, and how much story space you have for each phase.

Scene Placement: Every scene appears on the timeline at its specific position in the story. You can see how scenes are distributed across your narrative and spot gaps or clusters at a glance.

Content Status: Scenes are color-coded by status (Draft, Expanded, Written), so you can immediately see which parts of your story exist only as plans and which have been written.

Character Evolution: Click on any point in the timeline to see the state of your characters, locations, and items at that moment in the story. This makes it easy to answer questions like “What did Sarah know at the 30% mark?” or “Where was the magic sword during the climax?”

Why It’s Useful

Instead of scrolling through scenes or trying to remember where things happen, the Timeline gives you spatial awareness of your narrative. You can:

  • Visualize story pacing and structural balance
  • Find specific scenes by their position in the overall arc
  • Track when characters enter, exit, or change significantly
  • Ensure framework beats align with your actual content
  • Plan where to focus your writing efforts next

The timeline uses a 0-1000 point system under the hood for precision, but you interact with it visually—just drag, click, and explore your story’s landscape.

Intelligent Scene Pacing

plotTree includes a rule-based pacing system that calculates word count targets based on:

  • Genre baselines (thrillers pace differently than literary fiction)
  • Scene type (action vs. dialogue vs. reflection)
  • Intensity and complexity levels
  • Character count and world-building needs
  • Special narrative positions (opening, climax, resolution)

The system uses multiplicative modifiers to adjust baseline targets, ensuring consistent and dynamic pacing throughout your story. All calculations are deterministic and transparent—no black-box algorithms.

AI Features: Credits or BYOK

plotTree uses expert-curated AI models optimized for storytelling. You can power AI features with:

  • Credits: Simple pricing (roughly 1,000 credits = $1 of direct API usage, plus a small platform margin). Your trial includes 2,500 credits that never expire.
  • BYOK (optional): Power users can connect their own OpenRouter API key to avoid the platform margin and pay providers directly at cost.

Either way, you get the same expert-curated models and prompt engineering. We handle the complexity—you just write.

What’s Next?

Ready to get started? Head over to the Quick Start guide to create your account and build your first project.

If you’re curious about our approach to AI-assisted storytelling, check out Philosophy & Design for the unfiltered version of why plotTree exists and how we think about AI in creative work.

The rest of the documentation covers everything from timeline navigation to scene pacing to vault object management. But the platform is designed to be intuitive—feel free to just start clicking around and figure it out. The docs will be here when you need them.

Welcome to plotTree. Let’s make some stories.