See the shape of your story before you write it.
A story diagram puts beats, scenes and chapters on a line from beginning to end, with the characters, places, questions and themes tied to them. It works in every Aevon project: novels, comics, films, games and musicals.
Harrow Point
Story diagram
Start from a structure, or from nothing.
Templates lay down the beats of a known structure so you can drop your scenes onto them. None of them is a rule; move, rename or delete any beat.
- Classic structures
- Three acts, the hero's journey, Save the Cat style beats, kishōtenketsu, Freytag's pyramid, the Fichtean curve, seven-point structure and the story circle.
- Made for each medium
- Comic issues across a series, film sequences, a game's quest structure and song spotting for a musical.
- Blank canvas
- Lanes for acts, characters or subplots, and nothing else until you add it.
More than boxes and arrows.
Nodes can be beats, scenes, chapters, events, characters, locations, open questions, themes, notes or frames that group a stretch of story. Links say what kind of connection they are: this causes that, this foreshadows that, these two conflict, this leads to that, these run in parallel.
Scenes and chapters link to the real chapters in your project, characters and locations to their entries, and events to your timelines, so the diagram is a view of the work rather than a drawing beside it. An intensity curve above the lanes shows where the story rises and rests.
Link types
Story diagram
- causesThe storm causes the wreck
- foreshadowsThe forged log foreshadows the betrayal
- conflictsAda's promise conflicts with Tomas's plan
- leads toThe signal leads to the rescue
- parallelTwo rescues, twenty years apart
Checks a careful editor would make.
The diagram can read itself for common structural problems and point you to the nodes involved: setups that never pay off, payoffs placed before their setup, mysteries never answered, template beats out of order, a main character absent from the climax, or a long story with no climax marked at all.
They are prompts, not verdicts. A dangling question can be the point of a sequel.
Structure checks
3 to look at
- A setup with no payoffThe locked drawer in chapter 2 is marked as a setup, and nothing ever opens it.
- A payoff before its setupThe ferryman's betrayal pays off a hint that only appears three scenes later.
- A main character missing at the climaxTomas carries half the book and isn't at the lighthouse on the storm night.
One diagram, any project type.
Story diagrams are part of every project type. A novelist uses them to map chapters to acts, a comic writer to spread an arc across issues, a screenwriter to check the midpoint, a narrative designer to connect side quests to the main line, and a musical's book writer to see where the songs fall.
Questions about Story diagrams
Which story structures can I start from?
Three acts, the hero's journey, Save the Cat style beats, kishōtenketsu, Freytag's pyramid, the Fichtean curve, seven-point structure, the story circle, and templates for comic issues, film sequences, game quests and musical song spotting. You can also start blank.
Do I have to use a template?
No. Start with a blank canvas and add lanes for acts, characters or subplots as you need them. Templates are only a starting arrangement of beats.
Can I have more than one diagram in a project?
Yes. Each diagram is its own entry, so a series can have one per book or issue and one for the whole arc.
Guides for this work
- Story Diagrams and Plot Structures Compared
A side-by-side look at ten plot structures, what each shape is good at, where it breaks, which medium it suits, and how to draw it as a story diagram.
- Beat Sheets for Screenwriters: Building a Movie Outline That Holds
How to build a beat sheet for a feature film: what a beat is, common structures, index cards, the therefore/but test, subplots, and a worked example.
Also in Aevon
- Comic Studio: Pages, panel layouts, art, lettering, script sync and PDF, CBZ or webtoon export.
- Script Studio: Screenplay format, beat board, breakdowns, shot lists, storyboards, Fountain and FDX.
- Game Studio: Design doc, quests, branching dialogue trees, levels and 3D assets.
- Musical Studio: Book and lyrics together, song list, running order and demo audio.
- Asset library: Concept art, references, 3D models, audio and video with the story they belong to.
- MCP server: Connect Claude, Cursor and VS Code to your projects with revocable access tokens.
Draw the story you mean to tell.
Open any project, add a story diagram and pick a structure to start from.
Draw your first story diagram