This page is for writers who will never publish an interactive story. You are writing a linear novel, and somewhere around chapter nine there is a decision you keep re-litigating: does she confront him at the funeral or wait? Every novelist runs these forks in their head; the head is a poor place to run them. Outlining tools hold one version of events, and "what if" lives in a graveyard of documents named draft-9-ALT-funeral-version.
A branching editor holds the counterfactual properly. Map the fork as an actual fork: both versions exist side by side, each written far enough to reveal its consequences, the whole thing visible as a shape. Then you choose — and here is the part that surprises people — the unchosen branch keeps paying rent. Knowing precisely what the confrontation at the funeral would have cost is what lets you write the restraint with conviction.
Nothing you make here is public unless you publish it. Stories are private by default; a plot map can stay a plot map forever.
The loop is short. Fork: at the decision point, create both branches — or paste the draft chapter into Splinter and let it propose the latent forks you have been circling without naming; seeing your own ambivalence itemized as "What if...?" questions is worth the price of admission alone. Write: take each branch two or three scenes deep, which is where consequences live — one scene deep, every alternative looks viable. Collapse: pick the winner, fold what the loser taught you back into the prose, and keep the map (JSON export is free) as the fossil record of the decision.
The Orchard Wall. A literary novel about two sisters and a boundary dispute that is not about the boundary. The fork: does the younger sister show the letter she found, or burn it? The novelist maps both, writes three scenes down each arm, and discovers the burned-letter branch forces the aunt’s motive into the open a hundred pages early — which is exactly the information she needs to keep it hidden well in the version she keeps.
A Colder Sea. A thriller hinging on whether the whistleblower boards the ferry in chapter nine. Boarding reads as braver, but the branch map shows it kills the antagonist’s leverage and flattens the final third. The writer keeps her ashore — and now knows precisely what tension the ferry was quietly protecting.
Alternate versions in documents are parallel texts you diff in your head. On the story map they are diverging paths you see whole: where they split, how far each has been explored, whether they could reconverge (sometimes the answer to "A or B?" is "A, then B’s consequence anyway" — visible as a merge, invisible in prose). Zoom out and the novel’s decision history is a picture. The structure guide is aimed at interactive writers, but its patterns — bottlenecks especially — describe how linear plots absorb alternatives too.
No. Stories are private until you explicitly publish, and there is no obligation to. Using the editor purely as a plotting instrument for linear work is a first-class use.
Yes — JSON export is free and contains every scene’s prose in order, easy to lift into your manuscript. Copying scene by scene from the editor works fine for shorter explorations.
No. Forking and mapping are manual features. Splinter (proposing branch points in pasted prose) and the drafting tools are accelerants, capped at 10 free calls a day, and every suggestion is accept-or-reject.
Outliners hold one timeline with notes; this holds several timelines as real, written, playable paths. The difference shows up two scenes into a fork, where consequences start contradicting your assumptions.