Structure
A ruler, not a form.
Ten shapes ship with Sgeulai's Structure tool — the act divisions, the sequence method, the mythic journey, and their relatives — each one placed against a manuscript's actual chapters and reported as a drift chart, not filled in like a form. None of them carries a commercial name. That's on purpose.
What ships
Shapes nobody owns.
Every built-in structure is old enough, or general enough, to belong to nobody in particular — the three-act division predates the novel; the mythic journey is comparative mythology's reading of stories nobody wrote for royalties. Sgeulai describes each one in its own words and puts a number on every beat: where it falls, as a percentage through the book, never a fixed page.
| Shape | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Three Acts | Setup, confrontation, resolution — the division most other structures elaborate on. |
| Four Quarters | The same shape cut at the quarters, putting a milestone every 25% instead of one long undivided middle. |
| Five Acts | Rise, turn, fall — the classical dramatic shape, with the consequences given a movement of their own. |
| Seven Points | Seven turns, planned from the ending backwards so the opening is the state the ending overturns. |
| Eight Sequences | The book as eight self-contained stretches, each with its own question and answer. |
| The Hero's Journey | Departure, initiation, return — the mythic pattern, in twelve stages. |
| Whole-Book Shape | The three movements of a book at full length: an opening that sets the terms, a middle that raises the pressure, a close that pays for it. |
| Fichtean Curve | No setup act — a rising series of crises, each worse than the last, breaking at a climax near the very end. |
| Problem-Solution Structure | Nonfiction shape: state the problem, rule out what's already been tried, give the real answer, spend the book making it usable. |
| Thematic / Mosaic Structure | Essay-collection and braided-narrative shape: self-contained pieces arranged by theme rather than chronology. |
The one rule
Borrow the shape. Not the book.
What's missing from that list is every named commercial beat sheet — the fifteen-beat movie-structure book on a screenwriter's shelf, the method a story-coach sells seminars on. Their shapes usually rhyme with something in the list above; their exact beat names, their specific wording, their trademarked titles do not belong to Sgeulai, and this app doesn't ship them.
If you own one of those books, typing it in takes a few minutes: a name, a beat list, a percentage for each. From the moment you save it, Sgeulai can't tell your typed-in structure from a built-in one — it places your chapters against it, charts the drift the same way, and can generate a starting outline from it exactly like it would from Three Acts. The book's beats were always yours to type in. What Sgeulai gives you is the machinery underneath them.
On a real draft
The chart is a question, not a grade.
Choosing a structure draws a drift chart: a bar for the manuscript's actual length, dashed lines for where the structure's beats fall. Nothing stops a writer from measuring the same draft against two rulers at once, or none.
Set actual… records which chapter really landed at a given beat; past roughly 2,000 words off, Sgeulai calls that drift rather than staying quiet about it. None of this blocks anything — a beat with no chapter assigned yet just reads Not placed yet, and Stop using a structure is one menu item away at any point in the draft.
Build your own
Type it in once. Sgeulai does the rest.
A custom structure starts blank, or as a duplicate of any built-in or existing custom one — a head start when your own shape is close to something that already ships. Editing a built-in doesn't touch the shipped version; it forks a private copy under your own name the moment you change it.
Save a structure to this project only, or to your Library, a small cross-manuscript shelf that follows you into the next book you start. Export it as a .beatsheet file first and it travels to another Mac, or to a co-writer, the same way.
Both directions
Forward from a shape, or backward from a draft.
Build chapters from… turns a chosen structure's beats into a scaffolded outline of chapters and scenes before a word of the draft exists — useful when the shape is decided before the writing starts. The reverse tool reads chapters that already exist and proposes the closest structural match — useful on a manuscript that was never planned against a shape at all, and is only now asking what shape it turned out to have.
Nobody owns the shape. Somebody owns the book.Structure · the Sgeulai Structure tool
The shape serves the draft.
A structure is a ruler held against a manuscript, not a form the manuscript has to fill in correctly. It measures; it doesn't require. A chapter that lands nowhere near where a beat expected it isn't wrong — it's information, the same kind Continuity Check surfaces on the Story Bible side. None — decide later is a real, permanent option, and switching structures mid-draft costs nothing more than picking a new one from the menu.