Multi-thread planning: beats for shape, timelines for time

In one line: how to plan an A-story and a B-story now that "storyline" isn't a record any more — the shape of your threads goes on a .beats board, the order things happen in goes on a .timeline.

The Storylines tab is gone. Multi-thread writing isn't.

Two different things, kept apart. Writing several threads at once is a craft problem and it hasn't changed. The .storyline record is gone, and these went with it:

• the season-storyline / episode-storyline split
• a colour per thread, and the colour bar on a scene card
• status (planned / active / resolved / abandoned) and the "orphans only" filter
• the field that said "this scene belongs to the B-story"

Scene cards in 4.0 carry no storyline colour bar, and that is deliberate: one episode is one .script file, and the file has nowhere to keep a storyline. So thread planning moved onto two other file types.

Why long-form needs more than one thread

This part has nothing to do with the tool, but it's the reason for the rest of the article. A short film usually gets by on one or two threads. A series can't:

• Every episode has to feel like it moved, and the main story can't take a big step every week. The subplots are where "something happened this week" comes from.
• Several threads let you stagger the climaxes: the A-story bottoms out in episode 4, the B-story doesn't turn over until episode 7, and the saggy middle stops being a place.
• A single thread stretched over a season runs out early, and the back half starts stalling.

That is how the twelve episodes of Ink Tide (Screenplay) are laid out: the A-story is Shen Yan and Pei Zhao fighting over the same manuscript, the B-story is the Word Bureau seizing banned books, the C-story is the legend of the drowned city of Licheng that A-Tang keeps half-telling at the Salt Bridge Night Market. None of the three lands in the same episode as the others.

Shape: a .beats board

A beat board is acts (the columns) plus beat cards, and a beat card can hold file cards — drag Screenplay/Episode 03 - Her Father's Letter.script from the file tree onto a beat and that episode is pinned to it. That is exactly what Notes/Story Skeleton.beats in the Ink Tide (Screenplay) sample looks like: three acts, fourteen beats, all twelve episodes pinned to the beat they serve.

Two ways to lay out threads, depending on how independent yours are:

One board per thread. A book can hold several beat boards. A-story Shen Yan and Pei Zhao.beats and B-story The Word Bureau.beats each run from episode 1 to 12 without interfering. The same episode's file card appears on more than one board — which is exactly what "this episode moved two threads" means.

Choose this when the threads have genuinely different rhythms. The cost is that you compare them by switching boards.

One board, an act per thread. Rename the acts to A-story, B-story, C-story, and each column top to bottom is that thread's progression. You see the length of all three, and the gaps, at once.

Rename acts whenever you like — once a template lands, those words are just your data (see choosing one of the four structure templates).

The A / B / C convention

A-story = this episode's main business B-story = the second most important thread C-story = a one-episode runner, or a long seed

The letters are relative and can shuffle per episode. Across twelve of them "B-story" stops meaning anything, so a descriptive name wears better: "Word Bureau seizure" beats "B-story". Both at once is fine — "B: Word Bureau seizure".

How to work a board is in what a beat board is and creating and arranging beats and acts.

Clock: a .timeline

The board answers order and weight. The timeline answers "what else is happening that day". It has labels (swimlanes) — one per thread — and events sort onto their own row by time. When the A-story's climax and the B-story's reveal fall in the same week, the timeline shows two cards next to each other; the board can't show you that.

Flashbacks are where you feel it most. "Episode 7 has a memory of Shen Zhuoyan from twenty years ago" is one card in episode 7 on the board, and an event twenty years back on the timeline. Both are correct; they answer different questions.

A timeline can run on a real calendar or on free ordering, and an event can be hooked back to a note or an episode. See what a timeline is and entries and swimlanes.

Without a colour bar, how do you mark a scene?

If you do want "this scene moves the B-story" visible next to the scene, there are three practical options:

1. Put it in the scene summary. In Board view a card's summary is editable in place. Starting it with "B:" costs nothing, and the summary is part of what AI reads.
2. Use the beat dropdown. Each card has a structure field at the bottom right, and B Story is one of the fifteen names already in it — pick it and the card says so. What the dropdown does not have is a box to type a name of your own (see structure).
3. Hang a note on it. Right-click a line and add a note; the notes panel can be read per file, and it outlives a card summary.

Related

• Docs: Structure: acts and beats against files
• Docs: What a beat board is
• Docs: Creating and arranging beats and acts
• Docs: Choosing one of the four structure templates
• Docs: What a timeline is
• Docs: Entries and swimlanes
• Docs: Relationship maps
• Docs: Setup and payoff notes