Bonafor

How it works

Bring the book in as it is.

Four ways in, depending on what you already have: a manuscript, an outline, notes on a world, or only an idea. Each one ends inside the book, with nothing to prepare first.

Bonafor is not open to authors yet. These are screens from the app as it stands today, shown with public-domain books.

The empty Library, asking where your book is right now, with four doors: import a manuscript, import an outline, import your notes, and start a book.

A manuscript

The draft you already have

Bring in a Word file, Markdown or plain text. It is read before anything is made, and every chapter break is drawn on your own words, so a break in the wrong place is one click to change. Then it becomes a book, chapter by chapter, and if it was the wrong file, one undo takes it all back.

A Christmas Carol read for review: its five staves listed beside the text, with each break shown between the paragraphs it falls between.
Naming the book before it is made: the title A Christmas Carol, and Charles Dickens as the name on the cover.
Inside the new book's first stave, with a line saying what the import made and an Undo import button.

An outline

The plan, before the prose

Paste an outline, or bring in a Plottr file, a spreadsheet or a list. Bonafor says what kind of outline it thinks it is and why, and every line shows what it will come in as: a chapter, a scene, or left as text. The people it names that you have no note for yet are offered as notes, and nothing is made until you say so.

An outline of the opening chapters of Pride and Prejudice, each line marked with what it will become, and Jane Austen as the name on the cover.
The outline on the Plot board as chapters and scenes, with a line saying what arrived.

Notes on a world

The people and places you keep track of

Notes on characters, places and secrets, in one document or a folder, become the vault: one note for each heading, with lines like Role become details beside the note. The vault belongs to the name on the cover, so it carries across every series written under it.

Notes on the people of A Christmas Carol being reviewed, one heading per note, with Ebenezer Scrooge opened beside the list.
Ebenezer Scrooge as a note in the vault, his role as a detail and Dickens's own description below it.

Only an idea

A title, and a shape to fill

Start with a title and the name on the cover, and choose a story structure beside them, or none. The board opens on the first beat with what it is for and where it usually goes wrong, and asks what happens there. One line is enough to make it a scene.

Starting Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde under Robert Louis Stevenson, with the three-act structure chosen from the structures on offer.
The new book's board, its first beat open and asking what happens there, with one line typed in.

Once it is in

A story inside the story

The book’s beats run across the top. A plotline can carry a structure of its own beside them, from the same list, in a lane of its own just under the book’s. Here Mr Utterson’s inquiry, a subplot, carries a mystery’s beats, each at the part of the book where it roughly falls. The reveal is landed by the last chapter, Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case, on the main plot.

The plot board for Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: the three-act structure's beats across the top with Mr Utterson's inquiry's mystery beats in a lane beneath them, then the main plot under Book plot and the inquiry under Subplots, each row's scenes named after the book's chapters, the reveal landed by the last chapter.

Whichever door, the same book

The chapters a reader meets and the beats the story has to reach, joined where a scene lands a beat. How Bonafor is laid out →