Build and maintain the outline

Use the Markdown outline as a structural contract, edit it incrementally, and keep it aligned with the screenplay.

What the outline is for

The Outline is a persistent Markdown story plan for the current episode. It is the right place for acts, sequences, turning points, scene intentions, and causal progression. It is not the screenplay and does not automatically become formatted scenes.

A useful outline tells you what changes, why the next unit follows, and what pressure increases. Avoid a list of unrelated events. Use headings to make the hierarchy readable and concise bullets or paragraphs to express dramatic movement.

Edit incrementally

When a direction changes, update the affected section rather than replacing the whole outline. Whole-document replacement is appropriate only for an empty outline or a clearly confirmed reset. Incremental edits preserve accepted structure and make collaboration easier to review.

Good requests name both scope and invariants:

Revise the second sequence only. Keep the ferry accident and the final reveal. Make each beat a consequence of Mara hiding the radio message.

Align structure with pages

Before writing several new scenes, confirm the relevant outline segment. After screenplay edits, return to the outline and update any promise that is no longer true. The AI assistant is designed to read structure before broad writing, but you should still verify that the final outline reflects the actual episode.

Separate shared facts from episode structure

Character identity, locations, props, worldview, and knowledge files are project-level. The outline may refer to them, but it does not own them. Put durable rules such as “time runs backward inside the archive” in Worldview, source research in Knowledge, and the episode-specific consequences in the Outline.