Canvas
How characters are tangled together, or the order events unfold in, is easier to take in when you draw it than when you write it out. On a Canvas you place cards freely and join them with connectors, drawing relationship maps, plot flow, and scene order on one screen.
Say it's a map of Vincent and Raon. Place both characters' World nodes and join them with a connector labeled ‘brothers’. Divide the horizontal axis along the top into chapter regions, and the card for Vincent leaving the village sits under region 03, so you can see when it happened too.
Creating a canvas
- Make a new page on the Documents tab.
- Choose Canvas rather than a document page.
Zooming and moving around
Zoom with Zoom in and Zoom out in the bar at the bottom right, or hold Ctrl (⌘ on a Mac) and scroll to zoom around the pointer.
Scrolling moves the canvas. To drag it instead, hold Space and drag an empty spot, or pick Pan (H) in the toolbar at the bottom and switch back with Select (V). On a touch screen, drag with a finger.
Placing cards
- Press Add card.
- Click the spot on the canvas where you want the card.
Cards usually carry the flow of the story — scenes, events, turns. Drag a card to move it and drag a corner to resize it, and give each a shape (rectangle or ellipse), a color, and a text alignment (left, center, right) to tell them apart.
- To move several cards together, drag across empty space to select them and join them with Group.
- To get from a card straight to a page, link a page in the Space with Link page. The card shows that page's name; press the name to go to the page. Unlink removes the link.
Placing World nodes
For characters and places, place the World nodes you've already organized rather than writing them out again. Place one with Add world node and the actual character, place, or story node from your World becomes a card. Turn on Follow type color and the card takes the color of its node type.
Joining cards with connectors
- Press Add connector.
- Click the card to start from.
- Click the card to connect to.
A connector takes a Label and a style, and you can delete the ones you don't need.
Dividing an axis into regions
A canvas always has a horizontal axis along the top. Divide an axis into named regions, and where you put a card carries meaning in itself — time on one axis, faction or intensity on the other, say.
- Press + at the end of an axis to add a region. Drag a region's edge to resize it.
- Press a region's label to name it (Region name) and give it a color. From the same spot, choose Add region on the left, Add region on the right, or Delete.
To use a vertical axis down the left as well, open the canvas settings with the grid button in the top-left corner, where the two axes meet, and turn on Vertical axis regions. Turn on Grid in the same settings to lay down a grid.
When cards lie past the spot where a new region goes in, you're asked whether to move them out of the way — Shift or Create without shifting.
Having the agent draw it
Ask in chat and the canvas-drawing subagent (canvas_writer) draws it from your World nodes and the pages you point to. World nodes go on as node cards, and the links between them become connectors.
- “Draw the character relationships around Vincent and Raon on a canvas” — makes a new canvas page.
- “Redo that canvas with the order of events in chapter 3” — redraws a canvas you already have. Everything on it is replaced by the new drawing, and the cards it replaces go to the Archive.
The chat keeps Canvas and the canvas's name on one line. While it works, it shows Drawing the canvas; when it's done, Open appears at its end, and Overwrite too when it redrew a canvas you already had. If that canvas is open, it updates on screen.
- You can restore a deleted canvas from the Archive, down to its cards and connectors.
- On a card linked to a page, dragging the page name moves the card too.
- The agent draws straight away, whatever your Edit permission is set to.
- On the Max plan, pick the model that draws it in the Canvas row of Models by feature.
FAQ
Are canvas cards the same as World nodes?
Only a node card placed with Add world node points to that very node in the World. A node card shows the node's name, and you don't write text on it. A card placed with Add card exists only on that canvas and doesn't go into the World. Removing a node card from the canvas leaves the node in the World.
Should I draw a character relationship map on a Canvas or in the Graph?
Record the relationships in the World and the Graph draws the map for you. Put Raon in Vincent's relation property, and a line joining the two appears in that type's Graph. To place things yourself or draw characters alongside event cards, put node cards on a Canvas and join them with connectors. You can also ask the agent, “Draw the character relationships on a canvas, centered on Vincent and Raon.”