Power Structure helps you brainstorm, organize, and outline your novel, screenplay, TV show, or play.

Power Structure™ is the first story development environment designed for writers who aren't in search of an electronic muse, but who have a story that they want to tell, and who simply want a better "place" to do it.

With Power Structure™ there are no complicated forms to fill out, no new theories of story or arcane terminology to learn. Instead, it conforms to you, its nine unique story views giving you a Playground of the Mind™ where you can explore, develop and yes, even structure, the best writing of your career.

Instantly jump from looking at the smallest detail of your story to the big picture with the click of a mouse. Graphically track conflicts, subplots, characters and themes so you never lose track of what you set out to do and what you've accomplished.

Built by the same team that brought you ScriptThing™ and Movie Magic® Screenwriter™, Power Structure™ brings the same intuitive ease-of-use, power and flexibility that these programs are known for, and applies them to the story development process.

Complete integration with Movie Magic® Screenwriter™allows you to take a script that you want to rewrite, and simply open it in Power Structure and have all your entire script in the program ready for analysis and rewriting. When you're done with the restructuring / rewriting, simply click a button and it exports it back to a ScriptThing/Screenwriter Script with all your dialogue, character names and so forth still all formatted correctly for you!

Why Power Structure?
Sure, there are almost as many Story Development software programs out there as there are Writing Gurus... so many of them that you are probably thinking: why do we need another one? The answer is surprisingly simple.

Until Power Structure, the only sort of programs available were ones designed for writers who wanted writing help from some sort of electronic muse, and if you're anything like us... that just doesn't sound all that attractive.

I'm a writer because I have stories that I want to tell.

Power Structure is designed to help me use my existing skills as a writer to tell these stories better, and to give me tools to help me discover my own weaknesses as a writer and overcome them myself.

WHAT POWER STRUCTURE WILL DO:
Inspire you to think about story elements and character development in ways that you might not have thought about before.

It will give you a Playground of the Mind™ : innovative, graphic methods of looking at your story, its conflicts, character development and more so that you can easily spot weak areas and strengthen them. It will let you write in a manner that is most comfortable to you, letting you jot down ideas and write scenes in any order you want.

And most of all, it will simply give you a better place to write.

Power Structure's interface is based on nine "Views."
In each View, you can write, explore, and hopefully be inspired about some different aspect or aspects of your story.

Unlike other programs that have complicated forms to be filled out, Power Structure is designed to let you write at your own pace, and in the manner with which you're most comfortable.

Fill out as much or as little information in each View as makes sense to you. Then, as you move among them, the information automatically moves along with you, letting you dynamically build a coherent, structured story, not just some pretty report.

Furthermore, there's no requirement that you work in all Views, nor that you even use them in any particular order; they are there to inspire and aid you, not to give you busy work.

However, for simplicity in describing the program, we'll explore them in the order in which they appear in the program.

VIEW #1: Story / Theme View


This is the first View in the program. It is where you can explore your overall BIG story concepts.

It is here that you can type in a synopsis, or think about backstory, or write that potentially crucial pithy two line pitch. And like most everything in Power Structure, you can change the category names in the drop-down list, in addition to being able to add, delete or revise any of the basic categories.

You can write as much or as little text as you like here, from two words to twenty pages. Power Structure doesn't care; like everything else in the program, this section is designed to get you thinking about important ideas and to get your creative juices flowing... but if you don't find that thinking about this kind of thing is useful to the way you work, then simply skip it and move on to something that is!

VIEW #2: Characters View



This View is where you explore your Characters, with questions that spur you into thinking about their past and future, and how they grow and evolve in the story.

Fill in as much or as little as makes sense to you; think about how each character's strengths and weaknesses affects their changing roles in the story, think about what they all want at the each of the major turning points, how their desires change, and how the characters evolve.

But above all, think...

VIEW #3: 3 Act Structure



Aristotle codified the basic 3 Act Structure of dramatic storytelling in his Poetics well over two thousand years ago, and not only is the concept still going strong, but it is wonderfully compatible with other models of storytelling such as Campbell & Vogler's Hero's Journey.

Power Structure brings the power of the 21st Century (give or take a year!) to these ancient concepts, helping you build your stories with strong acts that have dramatic relevance for each of your characters, thus helping you to create an extremely strong framework on which the rest of your story can be built.

Recently, at the 1999 Banff International Television Festival, Aaron Sorkin, playwright and screenwriter of An American President and A Few Good Men, as well as the creator, writer and producer of the acclaimed television shows "Sports Night" and "The West Wing," said that all writers should read the Poetics, and that he believes virtually any story or structural problem can be addressed by some part of this seminal treatise.

VIEW #4: Sequences or Chapter View



If one looks at a story from the top down, you'd start with a Theme or Premise that encompasses the entire story. Below that, you might find Aristotle's Three Act Structure.

Under that, would be a Chapter if you were writing a novel; a Sequence, Scene, or TV / Stage Play Act if you were writing for film, television or the stage and using its terminology; or perhaps a Journey Stage if you were working using the ideas of Joseph Campbell and Christopher Vogler's Hero's Journey.

Regardless of what you call it, this Sequence allows you to group together a series of Story Beats and has useful questions to help ensure that this Chapter or Sequence has a strong focus and story movement, and that you actually accomplished in it all that you set out to do.

VIEW #5:
Story Beats / Scenes / Plot Points / View



Whatever terminology you use to define the most basic unit of the story, this is where you can focus on looking at the "trees" rather than the forest. Remember, that although the graphic above calls them "scenes", we are calling them Story Beats.

But whatever we call them, they are really the same thing.

The left hand "pane" of this window lists a short description of each Story Beat, and underneath each one are further detail items where you can introduce, heighten and resolve conflicts; explore who this Story Beat affects most in the story, and exactly how it affects them; examine how this Story Beat relates to the larger themes and Overall Ticking Clock and so on.

The right panel changes according to what option is selected on the left, and lets you fill in details, explore, and develop this Story Beat to whatever degree you like.

VIEW #6: Gestalt View



A compelling story can well be called a gestalt, for it contains interwoven elements that all tie together to make a whole that is indeed more than the sum of its parts.

Within Power Structure's Gestalt View, you can "walk" your way through the story, seeing how it flows and eddies, making sure that it both works as a unified whole and as its individual elements.

Note that you can both see and set the categorization / color coding of individual Story Beats ( in the above graphic these are listed as Scenes) in this View, and you can rearrange both your Sequences (a.k.a. Chapters) and Story Beats simply by dragging and dropping them with your mouse.

VIEW #7: Conflict Overview



Many writers describe story as the conflict between characters, and Power Structure is perfectly happy to work using this paradigm.

Power Structure is the only program on the market that allows you to see all your story's conflicts as a graph, so you can visually see how they evolve, peak and are resolved. With a glance, it lets you see if you have too much happening at one moment, while another section is "dead."

This View is also much more than just an analysis tool; you can do "live" editing of your conflicts, change the assigned tension level, reorder specific Story Beats (in the above graphic they are labeled as Scenes), and you could even write your entire story from within this view if you wanted to!

VIEW #8: Full Screen Word Processor View



A Blank Page can often be a very daunting environment... but sometimes you may just want to clear away all the distractions and focus on simply writing.

This View gives you that freedom.

From within it, you can Create New Story Beats, edit existing ones, change their one line text--e.g. "Casablanca is the gateway to freedom"--delete any that you want to remove, and even "walk" your way through them simply by pressing the up or down arrow keys.

You can write as much text as you like in this view, from a single line to hundreds of pages in one Story Beat (not that we recommend the latter, but you could!). Write snatches of dialogue or whole scenes, or just put down rough notes. It's all up to you.

As the animation above shows, when you reach the end of one, you're automatically taken to the next one, and so on. You can also go "upwards" or simply click on the drop-down list and jump to the Story Beat you want to work on.

VIEW #9: Index Card View



Index Cards have been a time honored way of breaking down and structuring stories; but aside from the ecological implications, it also has some practical limitations, for example, say you've categorized a Story Beat (Plot Point in the graphic above) on your Blue Action Cards and then realize that it's really more of an exposition scene which you have on green cards. You either have to get out the old bleach and dyes or rewrite the card.

Take the same problem into the electronic world, and you can simply fix it by dragging and dropping the card, as displayed in the animation above.

From this screen you can also:
• Display from one to sixty cards at once
• Display up to ten colored categories
• Reorder the Categories by Dragging and Dropping
• Drag'n'Drop Cards between categories Drag'n'Drop Cards to reorder them
• Add New Cards Edit Existing Cards
• Delete Existing Cards

And if that weren't enough, you also have a completely different way of using the Index Cards...

VIEW #9A: Index Card / Character View

From this screen you can also:



Display from one to sixty cards at once
• Display up to nine Characters and what their role is in this Story Beat (particularly useful if you are using the Hero's Journey archetypes) and/or how they are affected by this story beat
• Add or Edit any Characters Role or affected text relating to this story beat
• Reorder the Story Beats by Dragging and Dropping Recategorize Story Beats with a Pop-Up Menu
• Reorder or Swap among the visible Characters
• Add, Edit and Delete Cards