Hello! Thanks for stopping by.

I'm Riley Soloner. I'm a graduate of Flatiron School's Software Engineering bootcamp. I studied at their NYC campus. I was a part of cohort 062722.

This is Story Outliner. My Phase 5 capstone project.

I come from an acting and performance background. On Day 1 of a formative year-long acting school experience, I was given a lesson on script analysis. In short: the structure of most stories, whether in the form of a scene, monologue, a full movie or play can be broken down into five main parts: Context, Catalyst, Point of No Return, Climax, Denouement. My teacher illustrated these points on a line graph. Context starts at the bottom-left. The action rises steadily through the next two points, until reaching its apex at the climax. The Denouement is further to the right, lower than the climax, indicating the story's "falling action" and resolution.

Then, my teacher elaborated on this graph by erasing the lines between the points on the graph. He replaced each line with its own miniature, condensed version of the larger story arc. He asked the class what this image now resembled: The readings of an EKG. A story rises and falls like the rhythm of a heartbeat.

Stories are made up of smaller, interconnected stories.

This isn't the be-all, end-all of all forms of storytelling, but understanding and utilizing this framework helps to eliminate the broad mystery of storytelling and creative work in general.

There are thousands of graphs, forms and blog posts detailing the anatomy of an effectively written story, and yet I couldn't find an interactive tool for putting the narrative framwork to use.

Story Outliner's main page is a form with six main input fields. One for your title, and five for each of the five story parts.

Clicking on the yellow "v" arrow under each main story part reveals a collapsible list of five more story parts.

There's a collapsible list under each of the five main parts.

After filling in as many of these input fields as you like, you can click the "visualize" button at the top of the page to see your input arranged in sections over a story arc image. Each "bubble" can be expanded to see the inner collapsible lists underneath the main story parts.

At the bottom of the main form is a green "submit" button. This submits your input to a .json database. The contents of the database are viewable in the gallery page in reverse chronological order. Each outline in the gallery is viewable in list form or in a visualizer by clicking "visualize" next to the title of the outline.