The plot, chapter by chapter
Prepare your chapter beats
Your bible is the world. Your beat outline is the plot — what actually happens, chapter by chapter. This is the single most important thing you give the engine, because it's the one thing the engine will never invent for you.
How your outline sets the price. We read your beats
file to estimate your book's finished length and set the price before you
pay. The format that lets us read it automatically is simple: every
chapter heading on its own line as Chapter N: <title>,
with a prologue as Prologue: <title> and any epilogues
as Epilogue A: / Epilogue B:. If your file uses a
different format we'll ask you a quick question instead — nothing
wrong with that, but it's one more step. Keep the headings exact and your
price comes out automatic.
The deal
You write one beat per chapter, for every chapter. The engine takes each beat and expands it into the finished chapter — roughly tripling it into finer moments and then into prose. But it expands only what you give it. It fills the space of a chapter you mapped; it will not invent the plot of a chapter you left out.
A thin beat is worse than no beat. When a beat doesn't say enough, the engine fills the gap with its own default plot instinct — the average, predictable, seen-it-before version. That generic instinct is precisely the thing you're paying this engine to keep out of your book. Under-write a beat and you hand that chapter back to the machine.
So the goal of every beat is to give the expansion real material to work with — enough of your story that there's no room left for the generic one.
What makes a good beat
- Judge a beat by what it says, not how long it is. Every sentence should tell us something that matters: an event, a decision, a revelation, a change, or a fact about a character or the world. If a sentence just sets mood or restates the last one, it's not pulling weight.
- Write what happens, and how it leaves things — honestly. Say what occurs and where it lands the characters. If a chapter is a defeat, write it as a defeat — don't soften a loss into a near-win. The engine trusts your outcome completely, so an honest one matters.
- Events and consequences, not staging. You're the architect, not the set designer. "They cross the river and lose the map" — yes. The exact choreography of how they cross, the light on the water, the dialogue — that's the engine's job. Give it the what; it supplies the how.
- Don't tidy. A quiet chapter, an anticlimactic one, a chapter that ends on an unanswered question — keep it exactly as you mean it. Odd-shaped chapters are often doing deliberate work. Don't round them off into a conventional beat just because it feels neater.
- Name the point-of-view for each chapter if it changes — whose eyes we're in.
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Every chapter, numbered, no gaps. Use the format
Chapter 1: <title>,Chapter 2: <title>, … with none missing. If the outline jumps from 2 to 4, the engine stops and tells you rather than guessing what Chapter 3 was — because guessing is exactly what we refuse to do with your plot. TheChapter N:heading is also how we read your outline to estimate the length and set the price, so keeping the format exact is the thing that lets the whole pipeline stay automatic.
Thin vs. dense — the difference in one example
Chapter 4: The group has a disagreement and splits up.
Chapter 4: Following the flooded map, the group reaches the fork at Blackreach and finds the eastern bridge gone. Kade wants to wait for the water to drop; Mara refuses to lose three days and argues for the northern pass, which she's crossed before. When Dov sides with Kade, Mara realizes the group no longer defaults to her lead — the first crack in her authority. She takes the northern route alone at dawn, leaving the dive watch behind as a promise she'll be back. The others don't follow.
Same event count on the surface; wildly different amounts of your book in it. The dense version pins the location, the specific disagreement, the shift in group power, the emotional turn, and a concrete parting image — none of which the engine now has to make up.
Notes you can tuck into a beat
A beat can carry more than plot. Two kinds of note are worth knowing.
Asking for explicit content
If a chapter needs explicit sexual language, say so at the start of the beat in a bracketed note, and state the degree you want — the engine reads it and writes to that line instead of defaulting to a tasteful fade-out. For example:
[ed. note: this chapter should include explicit language in the love scene between Max and James — their sensual feelings and their bodies. Don't shy away from explicit detail; open-door sex.]
Max finally says why he left. James doesn't so much accept the apology as stop needing it, and what's been held back all book finally isn't.
Be as specific about the degree as you are about anything else you want controlled: "tender, sensual, closed-door" and "graphic, open-door" are different scenes, and the engine only knows which you mean if you say so.
Extra material you don't want to lose
You can also drop in things that aren't strictly plot — a line of dialogue you love, a specific interior feeling, an image you want the chapter to hit. Put them in. Just know the engine treats them as guidance to interpret, not lines to transcribe: it honors the intent and may reshape the wording to fit the finished prose. If something must land word-for-word, say so.
The shape of it
Keep it simple and consistent — a heading per chapter on its own line, the POV character, then the beat:
Chapter 1: The Wreck at Gray Harbor · POV: Mara Mara arrives at the salvage site expecting a routine survey and finds the wreck isn't the one on the manifest... Chapter 2: What the Report Left Out · POV: Mara ... Chapter 3: Blackreach Fork · POV: Dov ...
A title is optional but helpful, and naming the POV character per chapter is likewise helpful — in multi-POV books it's how the engine knows whose head each chapter lives in. What's not optional is that every chapter is present and mapped, in order, with no gaps.
If your book has a prologue, it goes on its own line at the top
— Prologue: <title>, no number. If you have
more than one epilogue, label them Epilogue A:,
Epilogue B:, and so on. Prologues and epilogues count
toward the chapter total because they generate prose the same way
chapters do.
How many chapters?
Your call — the engine builds to the count you give it. A tight thriller might be 24 chapters; an epic, 40. Map each one at the same level of care: don't lavish detail on the opening and let the middle go thin. The middle is where generic plot creeps in, so hold the line there most of all.
Keep the grain consistent. Aim for roughly one scene-turn per chapter — a single pivot or reversal in each chapter, with the beats and dialogue supporting that one turn. When chapters are the same shape, our length estimate is reliable and the price is honest. When one chapter is three times as dense as another, the estimate goes wobbly. Honest differences are fine; aimless sprawl is the thing to avoid.