Cast and Places
Two tabs on a story's structure screen — Cast and Places — turn the cast and location tags you set scene by scene into whole-story pictures: who appears where, whose point of view carries the book, and where the story spends its time. They sit beside Readability & Tone and, like it, look at the whole story at once.
Where the pictures come from
Both tabs are built entirely from your per-scene tagging — whose point of view a scene is, which characters appear in it, and which locations it visits. You set all of that from the Characters and Locations panels in the scene editor; see Assigning cast to a scene in the codex. Character colours are the ones you chose for each character in the codex.
The more scenes you tag, the fuller the picture. A coverage meter at the top of each tab tells you how many of your scenes are tagged, and if you have not tagged any yet the tab shows a friendly prompt rather than an empty chart — so it is fine to fill this in gradually. Hover any bar, cell, or label to see the detail behind it.
The Cast tab
Three views of your characters:
- Point of view — a ribbon spanning the whole story, with each scene coloured by its point-of-view character and sized by its word count, so you can see at a glance whose eyes the book spends the most words behind and how the viewpoint hands off from one character to the next. A key beneath lists each POV character and their share. Before a scene has any prose the blocks are sized evenly and the key counts scenes instead of words.
- Cast timeline — a grid of your characters against the scenes in reading order: a filled square where a character appears, a dot marking the scene they narrate, and a faint square where they are absent. Entrances, exits, and a character who drops out for a whole stretch all stand out immediately.
- Co-appearance web — a grid showing how many scenes each pair of characters shares, shaded darker the more often they are together, which surfaces the inseparable pairs and the loners. The diagonal shows each character's total number of appearances.
The Places tab
Two views of your settings:
- Setting swimlanes — a lane for each location, marked in every scene that visits it, in reading order, so you can read off where the story is set moment to moment and when it moves from one place to another.
- Location footprint — a bar for each place showing its share of the story's scenes, sized against your busiest location, so the home base and the one-scene detours are obvious at a glance. A scene set in more than one place counts toward each.