StoryCAD Collaborator
Our latest addition to StoryCAD is StoryCAD Collaborator, an AI assistant that helps you develop your outline. It is in beta testing at present, and Getting Started explains how you can join during the beta and how a paid subscription will work later. If a StoryCAD outline is a map, Collaborator is your GPS, an assistant that helps you navigate your story turn by turn. Collaborator is a set of workflows, small AI helpers that can help you with the details of building and assembling story elements into something unique: your outline for your story.
From within your outline, when you launch Collaborator, you choose a writing craft job (a workflow). Collaborator works with the story elements that the job needs, and suggests text for specific fields on those elements. You decide which changes to accept or reject; only what you approve goes into the outline.
Writing craft refers to the deliberate, learnable skills, tools, and techniques a writer uses to achieve a specific desired result in a narrative. We divide the craft into language skills (the micro level of words and sentences) and structure skills (the framework of your story, plot, characters, scenes, and so forth). StoryCAD is an outliner, so we don’t concern ourselves with language skills. There are plenty of excellent books and courses that help with these, including the best teacher: practice, practice, and more practice. Our trade is the structure, the bones of a story. There are also plenty of excellent books and courses that teach these skills. Our contribution, StoryCAD, is a free desktop app for Windows and macOS that applies computer-aided design to help you create an outline for your story. The outline comprises story elements, which include a story overview, problems, characters, settings, and scenes. Collaborator usually focuses on one specific story element: one problem, one character, and so on. The relationships that tie the story elements in an outline together are also important: scenes are ‘owned’ by problems and have a cast and a setting, and problems involve a protagonist and an antagonist. StoryCAD maintains these relationships as links, and Collaborator builds on them in order to maintain a cohesive story. It relies on structural principles like master plots, dramatic situations, and beat sheets to help you develop your story. But you are in control every step of the way and can accept a StoryCAD suggestion, reject it, or tell Collaborator to try again.
You don’t need Collaborator to use StoryCAD. You need StoryCAD to use Collaborator. It exists for people who want an always-available assistant without leaving the outline they’re already working on.
Collaborator is not a replacement for writing craft. It sits beside StoryCAD’s forms and the craft ideas in this manual (especially Writing with StoryCAD) and on StoryBuilder.org.