Story Structure & Arcs

Arcs are how you give a book its shape in Wonderthrough. An arc is a named thread — a plot line, a character’s change, or a thematic throughline — broken into beats, with scenes linked to the beats they deliver. This page is about building and editing arcs. For the AI tools that assess how well your manuscript supports an arc, see Advanced Analysis.

What an arc is

An arc is a structural backbone you can lay over your manuscript. Each arc has a name, an optional description, and a type that says what kind of thread it is:

Structural — the book’s overall shape, like a three-act or Hero’s Journey spine. Usually you’ll have one.
Plot-driving — a specific line of events: a subplot, a mystery, a romance, a heist. You can have several.
Thematic — a recurring idea or question the book keeps returning to, rather than a sequence of events.

The type isn’t a ranking — it just tells you (and the AI) what a thread is for, so a thematic throughline doesn’t get read as if it were the main plot. Pick whichever best describes the thread; a character’s emotional change usually lives in a plot-driving or structural arc depending on how central it is.

You can have several arcs in one book, and one is marked Primary — the story’s main spine. This is more than a label: the analysis tools and AI features focus on the Primary arc first, so it’s worth making sure the right thread holds that spot. You set it in the Arc Overview.

Beats

A beat is a milestone inside an arc — “Inciting Incident,” “Midpoint,” “Climax,” and so on. Beats give the arc its sequence. Each beat can hold a short description (a note about what the moment is for) and a list of the scenes that deliver it.

Beats are narrative notes and structure, not prose. Wonderthrough doesn’t draft the beat for you — it helps you mark where the beat lives in the manuscript and see whether your scenes are covering it.

Creating an arc from a template

When you create a new arc, Wonderthrough offers a set of ready-made structures so you don’t have to build the beat list from scratch. The picker groups them as Recommended (matched to your book’s genres), Universal (structures that work across genres), and Other, plus a blank option if you’d rather start empty.

The built-in structures include classics like Three-Act and Five-Act, the Hero’s Journey, the Seven-Point Story Structure, Save the Cat, Kishōtenketsu, the Fichtean Curve, and the Virgin’s Promise, alongside genre shapes such as Quest, Mystery, Romance, Heist, Thriller, Dystopian, Portal Fantasy, and Tragedy.

Pick a structure and you’ll see its description, its beat count, and the genres it suits before you commit. Choosing it creates the arc pre-populated with that structure’s beats, ready for you to rename, reword, and link scenes to. Prefer to invent your own shape? Choose the blank option and add beats as you go.

Linking scenes to beats

Open a beat and use Create or link scene… to either attach an existing scene or spin up a new one already tied to that beat. Linked scenes show as chips on the beat; remove a link with a click. A scene can support more than one beat, and a beat can draw on more than one scene.

This linking is what makes the rest of the structure tools meaningful — coverage and arc analysis both read from which scenes you’ve connected to which beats.

The Arc Overview

The Arc Overview is the home for all of a book’s arcs. Each arc appears as a card showing its type, whether it’s the Primary arc, whether it came from a template (and whether you’ve since modified it), and its beat coverage — how many beats have at least one linked scene, with a row of dots giving you an at-a-glance read. Coverage is colored so sparse arcs stand out from well-supported ones.

Use the Overview to see, in one place, which threads are well-developed and which still have empty beats waiting for scenes.

How this connects to analysis

Building arcs and linking scenes is the manual, authorial side. Once that structure exists, the AI analysis tools can do more for you:

Arc Coverage reads your linked scenes and tells you whether the manuscript is actually supporting the arc, or where beats are thin.
Arc Discovery suggests candidate arcs it sees forming in your scenes, for when structure is emerging before you’ve named it.

The simplest way to keep them straight: run Coverage on an arc you’ve already built to check whether your scenes deliver it; run Discovery when you suspect there’s structure in the manuscript you haven’t named yet. Both are described in Advanced Analysis. They surface findings about your manuscript — they don’t write the arc or the scenes for you.

Reading Arc Coverage results

When you run Arc Coverage, the results lead with an overall read of the arc — complete, partial, or sparse — followed by a few kinds of finding:

Uncovered beats — beats with no scene linked to them yet. These are gaps in the structure: a milestone the book is supposed to hit but currently doesn’t.
Weak beats — beats that do have a linked scene, but the scene supports the beat only thinly. The moment exists, but it isn’t landing with the weight the beat needs.
Pacing zones — stretches of the arc labelled by their tension shape: escalation (rising), plateau (holding steady), compression (events tightening), and release (easing off). These help you see whether the arc’s rhythm matches your intentions.

Treat all of it as findings to weigh, not instructions — an uncovered beat may be deliberate, and a plateau may be exactly the breather your story needs.

For the AI tools that assess arcs, see Advanced Analysis.
For how arcs differ from a character’s trajectory, see Arcs vs. Trajectories.
For how scenes are created and organized, see Writing & the Editor.
For visualizing tension across your structure, see Deeper Analysis Tools.