Your story’s memory
Story Map and timeline
See the whole book at once — as a web, a timeline, or a grid of arcs.
What it is
The Story Map is a full-screen visual view of everything in your Story Bible. It has three modes: a Web that draws characters, plot arcs and world elements as a connected graph; a Timeline that lays your events out as a flow of scenes or a grid of chapters against arcs; and an Arcs view showing how far each plot thread stretches across the book. It is where you go when the book has grown past the point where a list is useful.
Where to find it: Workspace → Story Bible panel header → Map button.
What this covers
- Interactive entity web with drag and zoom
- Automatic force layout, positions remembered
- Relationships you draw yourself
- Auto-derived connections from your text
- Narrative lenses: All, Focus, Conflict, Entity
- Filter by chapter or session
- Plot frames and world zones
- Node size by number of connections
- Red ring on entities with unresolved contradictions
- Timeline Flow view with scene analysis
- Chapter grid — chapters as columns, arcs as rows
- Arc coverage across chapters
- Detail panel with inline editing and AI assist
- Manage hub: merge, delete, reorder
- Keyboard navigation and a legend
How to use it
- 1
Open the map
Click Map in the Story Bible panel header. The first time it opens, the layout is computed automatically from your relationships.
- 2
Explore the web
Drag nodes to rearrange — positions are saved. Click an entity to select it and highlight everything connected to it. Double-click to isolate it and its immediate neighbours.
- 3
Draw a relationship
Drag from one entity onto another to connect them, then choose a label. Relationships you draw are solid; ones the app infers from your text are dashed.
- 4
Use a lens to cut the noise
The lens picker dims everything outside your focus: Focus shows only what the current chapter mentions, Conflict shows only entities with unresolved contradictions, Entity shows the selection and its neighbours.
- 5
Switch to the timeline
The Timeline view arranges your events as scenes, grouped by thread and location, with conflicts marked. The grid alternative puts chapters across the top and arcs down the side so pacing gaps become visible.
- 6
Tidy up in Manage
The Manage button opens a cleanup panel: merge duplicates, delete entities, and reorder or edit timeline events. Everything there is reversible.
What it gives you
Structure becomes visible
A gap in the chapter grid is a chapter where nothing happens to a thread. That is far easier to see as an empty cell than to notice while reading.
You find out who is actually central
Nodes scale with their number of connections, so the character you thought was a walk-on part but who touches nine threads is immediately obvious.
Problems are marked where you will see them
Entities with unresolved contradictions carry a red ring on the map, so consistency work has a visual home rather than living in a list you forget to open.
It is an editing surface, not just a picture
The detail panel edits entities in place, with per-field AI assist, so noticing something thin and fixing it is one motion.
Good to know
- The Story Map is marked beta and is under active development. Its data is your Story Bible, which is safe and unaffected.
- Dashed auto-derived connections come from name matching in your text. They cannot be deleted individually — edit the underlying entry instead.
- Undo on the web currently covers node movement, not relationship creation or deletion.
- Arc coverage is derived from timeline events. Arcs you have described but never tied to a dated event show as "not yet tied to a chapter".
Questions
Do I have to draw the relationships myself?
No. CharmWriter detects relationships from your sessions and also derives soft connections wherever a character's name appears in a plot or world entry. Drawing them yourself is for the ones you want labelled precisely.
Why are some lines dashed?
Dashed lines are inferred from your text — this character's name appears in that plot arc. Solid lines are relationships you or the extraction step defined explicitly, and they carry a label.
What does the red ring mean?
That entity is involved in an unresolved contradiction. Open the Contradictions hub in the Story Bible panel to see and resolve it.
Will re-arranging the map change my book?
No. Positions are purely visual. Editing an entity in the detail panel does change your Story Bible, and every change is logged.
Start your first chapter
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