Plot map — Quillvein

This page is guidance, not a system. Every story ever told is a deviation from the shape it started in — that deviation is usually the book. Choosing or changing a shape here never edits, moves, reorders or deletes a single word of your manuscript. It is a lens laid over the writing, not a mould pressed into it. Fiction, memoir, biography or reportage — pick the one that helps you see where you are, then ignore it the moment the work knows better.

The shape you're writing in

A starting point only. Re-establish it whenever the book — or the life you're recording — tells you something different.

Shape of the telling

Genre or subject beats

Pick a shape, pick genre beats, or both — the genre beats now sit on top of the shape rather than replacing it. Nothing here is required.

Aristotelian arc

Your chapters, plotted by tension, against the beats of this shape.

The oldest written description of a plot: something is set up, it goes wrong, a discovery flips it, and the consequence lands. Tragedy, literary fiction, anything where a single realisation changes everything.

Dashed line: the pressure this shape expects. Solid line: the pressure your pages are actually carrying, read from the writing itself.

Write Act Two, Part Three or End of Act One at the head or foot of a chapter and the map divides itself there.

Where you are

You are in Catastrophe / resolution — beat 5 of 5, roughly 100% of the way through this shape.

This beat usually runs hotter (about 42/100); your pages are reading 16. Either the pressure is still to come, or the shape is wrong for this book.

Beat 1 · written

Beginning

Ch. 1 · reading 39/100, shape expects ~9

Beat 2 · written

Complication

Ch. 2 · reading 35/100, shape expects ~57

Beat 3 · written

Reversal

Ch. 11 · reading 45/100, shape expects ~82

Beat 4 · written

Recognition

No chapter here yet

Beat 5 · you are here

Catastrophe / resolution

Ch. 22, 23 · reading 16/100, shape expects ~42

Finding the ending

Books stall when the loops outnumber the pages left. Here is what is still open.

At your current pace and tension curve, the climax wants to land around Ch. 7. You are on Ch. 5.

That is an observation, not a deadline. Some books earn a long third act.

Threads that must close, or be deliberately left open:

Nothing is hanging open yet. Mark a canon entry provisional and it gathers here until the story settles it.