Deal yourself a better story.

Throughline is a story development app that turns narrative structure into a simple card-based overview. Perfect for screenplay and novel outlining, beat sheet style, it lets you arrange characters, world, and plot beats in three visual rows. Drag and drop to rearrange, and see your entire story at a glance. It's designed for writers who think visually and want to break free from endless word processor documents. Available on macOS and Windows.

Your story lives in three rows. The World Row holds settings. The Character Row contains your cast. The Throughline (your story's spine) is where you stack Beat Cards that capture what happens. Each Beat Card can contain characters and a setting, as well as the actual text of your story—or just notes, if you want to write it out elsewhere! Throughline is what you make it.

Both! Screenwriters use Throughline to outline beats and scenes, import existing scripts, and export to industry-standard Fountain or PDF. Novelists use it to map chapters, track character arcs across scenes, and export to DOC or markdown for their favorite word processor. Same card system, different workflows—Throughline was created by a writer of screenplays, radio dramas, as well as children's books. Throughline can handle it all!

For import, Throughline reads screenplay PDFs, Fountain files, and existing Throughline projects. Because screenplays are structured, Throughline can automatically extract characters, settings, and dialogue. For export, you can generate PDFs (for both prose and screenplays), DOC, Fountain, plain text, and markdown—plus .thrl files to share projects with other Throughline users.

Anything with a narrative structure: feature films, TV episodes, limited series, novels, novellas, short stories, stage plays, or video game scripts. If your story has characters, a world, and beats that unfold over time, Throughline will help you structure it. While there's no built-in season/episode grouping yet, you can suggest features like that in the Throughline Discord Community.

No. Throughline has the most popular story structures and beat sheet templates built in—just drag and drop, and learn storytelling as you go. You can also build your own custom structures or import templates from third parties.

Final Draft and similar tools focus on formatting finished scripts. Scrivener organizes long-form writing into folders and documents. Throughline is different—it's built for the messy, creative phase where you're discovering your story, but it can support you through writing too. Instead of typing pages, you're moving cards, finding structure, and seeing your whole narrative in one view. When you're ready, export to DOC, PDF, Fountain, or any other mainstream format.