0% of the time, being a hero is really boring.
We love the story, the grandeur, the quest, the dragon, the triumphant return. Jack careening down the beanstalk. Finding out who Luke's dad is. It's riveting stuff. Makes for excellent tattoos.
But nobody talks about the parts in between. The weeks of walking in the forest, bland food, or hell, no food, the heat, the denial… the voices.
Nobody writes about that part.
I'm going to write about that part.
3:17 AM
It was past midnight. I'd been told, by people and by the voices (in my head), that the planning features couldn't be done in time for the friends-and-family launch. (They were right; it's not done, but more on that in—oh, I dunno—November.) The argument was reasonable. I hadn't designed it. Design takes me forever. There were too many unknowns.
Cut it.
Ship without it.
Here's the thing about reasonable arguments: sometimes they turn you into a chihuahua with rabies and a hankering for human flesh.
I? Me? Cannot complete something… bet.
I opened a drawing tool. I pressed record. And for eight unhinged minutes, I just narrated and drew.
“Okay, so let's say someone has a beat called a car chase, right? And they drag it here, and then we have character cards over here, and you can tag them, and then you flip to THIS screen, and now they're in chapter columns, and then there's this panel where you can write prose around them, and then there's a BUTTON that takes you to the clothesline, but some people need an 'outline' outline, so we need a prose section, and…”
Delirium took over.
I was drawing boxes. Moving things around. Talking to no one. Importing pictures of my fridge into the canvas. In fact, I was breathing hard. I rolled my chair back, just looked, and took it all in.
It was 3:25, and I started laughing.
Because it was good. Not good for a first attempt. Actually good. Legible. Interesting. Three modes, each designed for a different type of writer. Born from eight minutes of spite.
A night well spent.
Leftover Coals
This was not the first time I'd attempted this feature. Often, I present you a story of a problem and how I overcame it. This particular feature was not like that. I did not overcome easily.
Back in February, I attempted to build a planning system. I'd been watching authors on YouTube, creeping on their workflows, trying to understand how people organize novels. I came up with three screens. They weren't terrible. They also weren't right.
What survived was the Clothesline.
If you've been reading these devlogs, you know the Clothesline. It's the feature everyone gravitates toward, the visual timeline of your story—clues, beats, vibes, all hanging on a line like laundry, filterable by plotline, character, or whatever you want. People love it.
What I've never said publicly is that the Clothesline was left over from the wreckage. It's the one piece that survived a larger failure. The planning system I actually wanted to build didn't work because I didn't understand the problem well enough yet. I hadn't written enough. I hadn't watched enough writers. I hadn't sat in a room with five authors and seen how differently each of them approaches structure.
The Clothesline is beautiful. But it was never the whole idea.
Five Different Doors
I came back from the retreat in May with five faces still fresh in my mind. Each one planned differently.
There's the person who needs a canvas. An infinite space to throw things at the wall: sticky notes, character sketches, vibes. No structure. Just accumulation. Ideas have a type (this is a character, this is a beat, this is a theme) but no home yet.
There's the person who needs columns and templates. Chapter one, chapter two, chapter three. Drag the beat into the chapter. Apply your templates. Save the Cat will tell you this is the fun and games chapter. Romancing the Beat demands a meet cute here.
There's the person who plans in prose. No cards. No post-it notes. Paragraphs. Mildly incoherent sentences: “I need a reason for them to end up in the same tent but it needs to make sense but also be funny, oh… what if there was a bear… yeah... A BEAR. Oh then they could be in the tent and the MC could nibble on the other MC because the BEAR stole the sleeping bag too!! Excellent.” This person riffs. And then what? And then what? Almost improv, alone at a keyboard.
The fourth is a discovery writer, a person who derives meaning after the book is drafted. They painstakingly go back, examine the draft, look for clues, and build out the plotlines from the bones of the book.
The final is the chaotic mix of all of the above.
Five archetypes, all in the same room. The same data underneath all of them: the annotation graph, the sparks, the plotlines. Nothing is ever converted between these surfaces. Nothing is copied. The same ideas just deepen. They become plans, sparks, and eventually prose. The challenge is figuring out how to serve all these people. The images in this devlog represent my attempt at pondering how to serve them.
This would be prose from a book if I actually had my life together but instead, it's unhinged ramblings about two men and a bear.
However, this does represent how a person could write and then see their outline on the left
[Pretend there's a really good establishing sentence here about the campsite at night. Something about stars. Eugene would notice stars.]
Sam showed up at Eugene's tent flap like “so… hi.” Pretend this is more eloquent. Pretend Sam has a whole internal monologue about whether to knock on a tent. Can you knock on a tent? He tried. It just made a flapping noise. Terrible.
“The bear is in my tent,” Sam said. [Make this funnier. Maybe he says it like he's ordering coffee. Very casual. “Yeah so a bear is sleeping on my pillow, anyway can I—”]
They end up in the same tent. [This is the beat. This is where the Fun & Games template goes. Expand into an actual scene, because now they're in the SAME tent and Eugene is AWARE of this.]
[Insert 200 words of tension here. Sam is warm. Eugene is having a crisis. Sam snores. It's romantic but in a deeply unhinged way. Fix later.]
The Fridge, Again
If you read the very first devlog, you saw my fridge. The whole product was sketched on it with dry-erase marker. Boxes and arrows and a dream that was, frankly, a little deranged for someone with four hours a night and no design background.
The fridge is back.
No fridge is safe
New kitchen. New markers. Different mountain. In January, the fridge held the question: can I even build this? In June, it holds a planning system designed for people who aren't me.
I didn't know any of these things existed in January. I hadn't met the writers who would need them. I hadn't failed at the February version. I hadn't sat in my cave at 3 AM angry enough to solve it.
A Quest
I've been thinking about the hero's journey. The classic version is a circle. You leave home, you face trials, you return transformed. Satisfying in a three-act-structure kind of way.
I don't think that's quite how it works.
The journey is a circle. The hero's experience is a graph.
You don't go out and come back. You collect quests, meet new people, fail a bunch, uncover new versions of problems you've already tried to solve. Die in the tutorial zone to level-one bunnies forcing the NPCs to regret ever giving you a task. Down too much sparkling water and develop the habit of talking to yourself.
That is not a circle. I'm never going back to the tutorial zone. As if!
Each connection that you make changes the shape of your entire experience. February's failure is connected to May's retreat is connected to June's 3 AM breakthrough. None of them make sense without the others. There's no circle. There's a web of things that had to happen in the order they happened, and you can only see the pattern looking backward.
I tried to build this in February and failed. But the failure gave me the Clothesline.
I showed the Clothesline at the retreat and learned that planning converts.
I sat down in June with that knowledge and couldn't solve it for weeks.
Then someone told me I couldn't do it, and I solved it in eight minutes.
I'm going to leave you with something, that I don't think gets shared enough. 50% of my problem was indeed I had not tried hard enough. I did not have enough skin in the game. But the other 50% is I simply didn't know enough. I had not slayed enough dragons or done enough escort quests. I was trying to serve heroes, and I had barely experienced battle. But, if you haven't figured it out by now, I am not in the business of giving up; so I guess my only option is to do more quests.
Relearning My Shapes
Chiron is often forgotten in mythology. Simply a teacher to great heroes. But we often forget: to teach a hero, you first have to become one. And becoming one looks nothing like the stories. It looks like camping on a mountain. Eating bad food. Staring at problems in the dark. Getting angry enough, eventually, to irrationally solve them.
I have secured a campsite on Pelion, a residency, you might say. I have much to learn about being a hero, especially if my goal is to light the way for others.
a campsite on pelion
The hero's journey isn't a circle. It's a graph, and your story is one too. I'm building aampersand for however you plan — an infinite canvas, chapter columns, or unhinged prose rants at 3 AM — all over the same connected story. The trailhead opens this fall. Join the email list and be first up the mountain.
Next month: I'll try my hand at translating mumbo jumbo.