Sweave is an infinite canvas for the story that’s been stuck in your head. You throw in ideas whenever they come, and in whatever order, and it helps you sort them, connect them, and find out what’s missing. This guide walks through the whole process, from your first card to checking your outline against a story structure.

Finding your way around the board

Drag any empty space to move around the board, and scroll to zoom in and out. There’s no edge to run into, so take up as much space as you need.

Three things frame the board:

• The idea bar along the bottom, where new thoughts go in.

• The toolbar on the left, with cards, shapes, groups, structures and tools.

• The tabs along the top, which let you look at one category of card at a time.

If you ever lose track of something, the ? button in the top-right bar has a short set of tips, and hovering each one highlights the part of the screen it’s talking about.

Getting ideas down

Type anything into the idea bar and press Enter. It can be a character sketch, a line of dialogue, a half-remembered dream, a scene you’ve replayed in your head a hundred times. Sweave gives it a short title, figures out what kind of idea it is, and drops it on the board as a card.

Your exact words are never thrown away. Each card keeps what you originally typed, and you can switch a card back to your own wording whenever you want by right-clicking it and selecting Original capture from the menu.

A few other ways to add ideas:

• Use the mic. Hit the mic button on the bottom left of the idea bar and just speak (up to two minutes). Sweave transcribes it and sorts it like anything you’d type.

• Add a picture or a sound. Use the media upload button, or drag an image or audio file straight onto the board. It becomes its own card.

• Make a blank card. Press Shift+N to drop an empty card right under your cursor, or use Add Card in the toolbar.

• Skip the sorting. If you’d rather file something yourself, switch off sorting with the toggle on the bottom left of the idea bar and your text goes in as-is.

Card types

Every card has a type, shown by its color and icon:

• Character for the people in your story

• Location for places

• Dialogue for lines and bits

• Theme for what the story is really about

• Scene for things that happen

• Item for objects that matter

• Lore for history, rules and world-building

• Note for everything else

If a card lands in the wrong type, right-click it and pick a new one under Classify as. You can also change the colors for each category in Settings.

Working with cards

Cards behave the way you’d expect:

• Move a card by dragging it anywhere.

• Edit it by double-clicking the title or the text.

• Resize it from any corner. Hold Shift while you drag to keep its proportions.

• Select several by holding Shift and clicking, or Shift-dragging a box around them.

• Copy and paste with Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V.

• Undo anything with Ctrl+Z.

Right-click a card for everything else, including changing its type, rating it, and arranging which card sits on top when two overlap.

You can also format text inside a card. Select some words, right-click, and you can make them bold, italic, underlined or a different color.

You can see the full list of shortcuts, and rebind many of them, in Settings on the top-right bar.

Rate your ideas

Not every idea is the one, and that’s fine. Each card has a small rating pill in its bottom corner. Click it to mark an idea as Love it, Needs work or Not a fan. Ratings are just for you. They help you see at a glance what’s working, and some tools (like the Story Summarizer below) pay attention to them.

Connecting ideas

Stories are made of things that touch each other. To link two cards, drag from the edge of one card to another. A line appears between them, and both cards show the link.

Sweave will also notice when a new idea seems related to something already on your board and suggest a link. Suggested links show up on the card as chips. Confirm the ones that make sense and dismiss the rest. Nothing gets connected without your say-so.

Organizing the board

The toolbar on the left has everything you need to give the board some shape:

• Groups gather a set of cards into a labeled box you can move together. Click the group’s name to rename it.

• Shapes like circles, rectangles, arrows and lines are great for marking off areas or pointing at things.

• Text boxes for headings and labels right on the board.

• Free Draw for when you just need to scribble.

Most of these have a one-key shortcut too (T for a text box). You can see and change them all in Settings under Hotkeys.

The toolbar and the idea bar can both be hidden and brought back by clicking their chevrons.

Looking at one kind of idea at a time

The tabs along the top split your board by type. Open the Character tab and you see only your character cards. Open Scene and you see only your scenes. Click a tab or use the number keys to switch between them.

Each tab is a full workspace of its own, with its own shapes and groups. It’s a good place to focus, like sitting down to work on just your cast for an hour.

Inside a tab you can also run Deep Analysis on a card. It looks at that one idea from several angles and gives you a breakdown of where it’s strong and where it could go further. Make changes to the card, run it again, and see how your score moves.

Checking your story against a structure

This is where Sweave really earns its keep. Open Structures in the toolbar and you’ll find six classic story frameworks:

• Story Circle

• Hero’s Journey

• Three-Act Structure

• Save the Cat

• Freytag’s Pyramid

• Kishōtenketsu

Drag one onto the board. Hover over any stage to learn what it’s about. Then hit Analyze, and Sweave reads your cards and shows you which stages your ideas already cover and which ones are still empty. Those empty stages are your gaps, the parts of the story you haven’t figured out yet.

From the results you can place a card onto the stage it belongs to, or turn one of the suggestions into a new card in a click. You can move the framework around the board and resize it to fit.

If there are cards you don’t want included, like research notes or ideas you’ve set aside, select them and press Ctrl+H, or right-click and choose Exclude from analysis. Do the same again to bring them back.

Extra tools

Under AI Tools in the toolbar there are a few more helpers:

• Name Generator. Describe who or what you need a name for and get a list of options with a short note on each. Drag a character card onto the panel to work on names for that character.

• Story Summarizer. Turns your board into a readable summary you can share. Choose a quick summary, or “The Good Stuff,” which goes deep on what you’ve developed and is honest about what’s still thin. Cards you’ve marked Not a fan are skipped and the ones you love get more weight. You can edit the summary, then copy it or download it as a PDF or Word document.

• Draft Importer. Already have a script, a story draft or a pile of notes? Drop the file in (Word, PDF, Final Draft, Fountain or plain text) or paste it, and Sweave pulls out the characters, scenes, places and lines as cards. You review the list and pick what to keep before anything touches your board, and a single Ctrl+Z undoes the whole import.

• Idea Analyzer. Drag it onto any card, even an image or audio card, and it tells you whether the idea is working, with feedback on its strengths and weaknesses. If the feedback is worth holding on to, you can keep it on the board as its own card.

Boards, saving and sharing

Your board saves as you go. You can keep more than one storyboard and switch between them from the board title at the top or from your profile menu. Right-click a board in the list to rename it, give it a color, or delete it.

The Share & export menu lets you:

• Download a backup file of the whole board (cards, layout and shapes) that you can import again later.

• Save a board snapshot as a PDF.

• Import a draft, the same as the Draft Importer above.

Making it yours

Open Settings to tune things the way you like them:

• Card colors for each type.

• Hotkeys you can rebind.

• AI options, to tailor how much or how little influence Sweave’s AI has on your board.

Where to start

If you’re staring at an empty board, try this: spend ten minutes dumping every idea you have about your story into the idea bar, no matter how small or out of order. Then drag in a Story Circle and hit Analyze. You’ll be surprised how much of the story is already there, and you’ll know exactly what to work on next.