Most writing apps give you a blank page and leave you to figure out the rest. Charc gives you a structure first — and that structure is the Outline tab.
You don’t have to use the outline before you write. Some writers build the whole skeleton before they type a scene. Others draft freely and organize afterward. Charc supports both. But whether you plan or discover, the Outline tab is worth understanding early, because everything you build there feeds directly into the Write tab — and that connection is the spine of the whole app.
How the outline connects to the manuscript
Every scene node you create in the Outline tab becomes a writing block in the Write tab. Automatically, immediately, without any extra steps.
Create a scene called “The confrontation at the station” in the Outline. Switch to the Write tab. It’s already there, with an empty editor waiting. Write in the Manuscript, and the word count updates on the outline node. Rename the scene in either tab and it updates in both. Delete it from either tab and it moves to the Scrap Pile rather than disappearing permanently.
Acts and chapters don’t become writing blocks — they’re structural containers. Only scene nodes have a corresponding editor in the Manuscript. This is the key distinction: acts and chapters organize your story, scenes are where you write it.
The left sidebar reflects this too. When you’re in the Outline tab, the sidebar shows your outline tree. Switch to Manuscript and the same tree appears — now as a navigation list for jumping between scenes. One structure, two views.
The three node types
The Outline works with three types of nodes, each with its own role:
Acts — the largest unit. A novel might have three acts; a screenplay might have more. Acts contain chapters and scenes. In the outline they appear in gold, which makes the top-level structure easy to scan even when everything is expanded.
Chapters — the middle tier. A chapter lives inside an act and contains scenes. Not every project needs chapters — a short story might go straight from act to scenes, or skip acts entirely and work with chapters alone. The structure is flexible.
Scenes — the unit of writing. A scene lives inside a chapter (or directly in an act, or at the root level). Every scene becomes a writing block in the Write tab. Scene nodes are styled in italic to distinguish them from structural nodes at a glance.
You can add any node type using the toolbar buttons at the top of the Outline tab (+ Act, + Chapter, + Scene). There’s a matching row of buttons at the bottom of the outline as well, so you don’t have to scroll back up. To add a node inside another — a chapter inside an act, a scene inside a chapter — hover over the parent node and use the inline add buttons that appear on the right side of the header.
What’s inside a node
Every node — act, chapter, or scene — has the same set of fields:
Title — the main name. Click to edit inline. This is the title that appears in the Write tab scene header and in the sidebar navigation.
POV / tag — a smaller field to the right of the title. Use it for whatever matters most to you: a character name for the point-of-view, a location tag, a status label. It’s freeform and doesn’t affect export.
Synopsis — the body that expands below the header when you click the chevron. This is where you write what the scene is supposed to do: the beats, the purpose, the question it answers. The synopsis is visible in the Write tab as a collapsible section above the scene’s editor — a useful reference while you’re drafting.
Word target — a number field on the right of the header row. Set a target for any node and it feeds into the progress tracking on the Projects tab. Scene targets roll up into chapter totals; chapter targets roll up into act totals.
Drag to reorder
Every node has a drag handle on the far left — the dotted grip icon. Click and hold it to drag the node to a new position. You can drop before or after another node to reorder at the same level, or drop directly onto a parent node to nest inside it.
The chevron arrow on each node collapses and expands its children. When you have a long outline and want to see just the top-level structure, use the “Collapse all” button that appears in the toolbar — it folds every node at once. “Expand all” reverses it.
You can also drag and reorder nodes from the sidebar outline tree on the left, without opening the full Outline panel.
List view and card view
The outline has two views, and the toggle at the top left switches between them. They show the same structure — nothing is converted or duplicated — so you can work in either and swap whenever the question you’re asking changes.
List view is the one to reorder in. Everything is nested, every row carries its fields, and dragging is precise.
Card view is the corkboard. Each scene becomes a card carrying its synopsis, grouped under its act and tinted by the chapter it belongs to, so you can see the shape of a section without reading a word of the draft. Click into an act or a chapter to work on just that part, and the controls beside the toggle set how large the cards are and how much synopsis they show.
Scene colors and flags
Two visual tools help you make the outline scannable at a glance.
Scene color — click the small colored dot that appears to the left of the scene badge on any scene node. Pick a color and the scene card gets a subtle tinted background in that color. It’s purely visual, with no effect on export. Use it however makes sense: one color per POV character, a different color for subplots, red for scenes you know need work.
Flags — right-click any node and choose from the flag menu. Six preset labels are available: Needs revision, Placeholder, Research needed, In progress, POV issue, and Emotional beat — each with its own color. You can also enter a custom hex color if none of the presets fit. A small colored dot appears on the node header when a flag is set, making problem areas easy to spot without expanding each scene.
The right-click context menu
Right-clicking any outline node opens a context menu. Some of it duplicates the toolbar; the rest is only here.
Insert and Move — drop a chapter or scene directly above or below this node, or send it to the top or bottom of its parent. Faster than dragging when the outline is long.
Add — New chapter in act on an act, New scene in chapter on a chapter. The same thing the toolbar buttons do, without moving the mouse across the screen.
Duplicate — creates a full copy of the node and everything inside it, with new IDs. Useful for scenes with similar structure or chapters you want to use as a template.
Convert to scene / Convert to chapter — change what a node is when the structure turns out differently than you planned. Acts can’t be converted; chapters and scenes swap freely.
Send to Scrap Pile — removes the node (and its children) from the outline but saves everything to the Scrap Pile, where it can be restored. Nothing is permanently deleted.
Flag and Set scene status — the two color rows described above, reachable here as well as from the node itself.
Pinning is not in this menu — it’s the pin button on the node header. Pin a scene there and its synopsis sits beside you in the Write tab while you draft. More on that in a later post.
The sidebar outline tree
The left sidebar shows a compact version of your outline as a collapsible tree at all times. In the Outline tab it’s a navigation aid — click any node to jump to it in the main panel. In the Write tab the same tree becomes your scene list.
You can drag to reorder from the sidebar tree just as you can from the main panel. Changes in either place are reflected in both immediately.
Starting from a template
When you created your project in Post 1, you chose a template: Blank, Three-Act, or one of the others. Templates pre-populate the outline with a starting structure so you’re not staring at an empty panel on day one.
The Three-Act template gives you three act nodes with chapters inside them — a standard structure for novels and screenplays. The other templates follow different structures suited to different story shapes. You can add, remove, and reorganize any of it freely. A template is a starting point, not a constraint.
If you started with Blank and want more structure, just add acts and chapters manually. There’s no wrong order.
What’s next
With the outline understood, the next post goes deep on the other side of the project: the entity tabs where your characters, settings, and world-building notes live — and the Reference panel that brings all of it into the Manuscript with you while you write.
panel → [LINK PLACEHOLDER]