Understanding Structure
Learn how misenous organizes your writing with books, chapters, scenes, and drafts.
The Content Hierarchy
misenous uses a clear hierarchy to organize your writing:
Series (optional)
└── Book
└── Chapter
├── Scenes (organizational units)
└── Drafts (versioned content)
Scenes vs Drafts: The Key Difference
This is the most common question new users have. Here's the simple answer:
Scenes
- Purpose: Organizational units for planning and tracking
- Think of them as: Story beats, plot points, or narrative moments
- Track: POV character, location, timeline position, status
- Best for: Outlining, scene-by-scene planning, tracking POV distribution
Drafts
- Purpose: Actual written content with version history
- Think of them as: The manuscript text itself
- Track: Word count, version number, content history
- Best for: Writing, revising, keeping multiple versions
When to Use Which
Use Scenes when you want to plan your chapter structure, track whose POV each section uses, or visualize your story on the Storyboard.
Use Drafts when you want to write the actual prose, keep revision history, or work on multiple versions simultaneously.
A Typical Workflow
- Create your Book with title and synopsis
- Add Chapters for major divisions
- Plan with Scenes — break each chapter into scenes, assign POV characters and locations
- Write Drafts — write the actual content for each chapter
- Compose — optionally combine scenes into a unified draft
Scene Features
Scenes provide powerful tracking capabilities:
- POV Character — Link to a Character element
- Location — Link to a Location element
- Timeline Position — Track chronological order separately from narrative order
- Scene Order — Drag and drop to reorder
- Tags — Add custom tags for filtering
- Status — Track draft/in-progress/complete
- Scene Versions — Multiple versions of scene content
Draft Features
Drafts are optimized for writing:
- Rich Text Editor — Full formatting with Quill.js
- Autosave — Saves every 2 seconds
- Version Numbers — 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, etc.
- Current Draft — Mark which version is the "active" one
- Duplicate — Copy a draft to start a new version
- Element Insertion — Embed character/location references
The Storyboard
The Storyboard view shows all scenes in a chapter as visual cards. You can:
- See scene summaries at a glance
- View POV character and location for each scene
- Drag and drop to reorder scenes
- Quickly identify gaps in your planning
The Timeline
The Timeline view shows scenes across your entire book in chronological vs narrative order. This helps you:
- Compare when events happen vs when they're revealed
- Spot timeline inconsistencies
- Visualize flashbacks and flash-forwards
Learn More
Ready to add reusable characters and locations? Check out Writing with Elements.