The Story Builder Plus

AutoCrit’s Story Builder Plus is designed to help you move from inspiration to implementation. It gives you a guided space to develop your story idea into a stronger, more organized narrative by helping you build your premise, genre, tropes, worlds, characters, story beats, and outlines.

Story Builder Plus works well for both brand-new ideas and existing works in progress. It also includes tools to help you evaluate your concept for the market and run a virtual reader test before you start drafting, so you can build with more confidence from the very beginning.

You can access the Story Builder Plus in two places. The first is as a standalone story idea from your main Projects Dashboard, which is useful when you want to develop an idea before attaching it to a manuscript. The second is from inside an existing project, where you can build and refine story elements while working alongside your draft.

This gives you the flexibility to either plan first and write later, or develop your story structure from within an active work in progress.

From your Writer's Desk Projects Dashboard:

From inside your file, click the Planning tab, then click on Fiction Story Builder:

When the Story Builder opens on the right-hand side, click the New Fiction Story Builder Idea button to begin, or select an existing idea from your projects.

If you want to generate a complete idea, with all fields automatically filled out, click the Generate Ideas For All Empty Fields button.

To generate new ideas in individual fields, click the Generate New button in the respective field.

With our latest update to the Story Builder Plus, you can now add context or additional information before generating ideas:

The Update button here will update the text you have in the field with any changes in both the context box above it and any changes you've made in other areas of your story idea.

If you're unsure about details, you can also build your story, characters, and worlds using the sliders.

Click on Sliders to access them.

Once you've adjusted your sliders, click Update Text to have the Story Builder generate text based on your slider settings.

You can add additional context here, too, by clicking the little arrow next to update text and adding any details you want applied in addition to your slider settings.

If you like a world, character, or outline format, you can save them in AutoCrit to use in other projects. Click the Save icon here, then click Save New to store a character, world, or outline.

Saved characters, worlds, and outlines can be accessed by clicking My Characters, My World, or My Outlines.

This opens the relevant Preview Window, where you can view and select items to add to your current Story Idea.

The My Characters Preview Window:

- Any characters shown here are available across all projects.

Clicking Select will add the character to your current Story Idea.

Fullscreen

To increase the size of your Story Builder field, you can also click the Fullscreen button.

Close this screen by clicking the option again in the top right-hand corner here:

Clear field

Clicking the trash can icon will remove all the text and data in a specific field and will restore your sliders to their default positions.

Copy to notes and clipboard

Clicking the Copy to Note button will copy the results in the field to your AutoCrit notes.

This will send the data to your AutoCrit Notes here:

Notes will not display your slider values - they will only contain your text.

Clicking the option to 'copy to clipboard' will store the text on your device's clipboard to paste elsewhere.

If you need further assistance, feel free to message us in the customer support chat or by emailing [email protected].