Structure around the scene. Never inside the prose.

Keep prose clean

Writers have always tracked things about scenes: whose eyes we see through, where we are, what day it is, whether the scene is finished. The usual places for those notes are the worst ones. A bracketed line at the top of the scene, a colour in the margin, a spreadsheet in another window.

In Sutura the manuscript is protected territory. The editor shows the writing and nothing else. A scene’s properties live outside the writing surface, one glance away and never a word of the text.

They are not part of the text: they do not export with it, and they are never counted as words.

Track what matters to this book

There are no built-in scene fields. Point of view, Location, Timeline and Status are examples of properties a writer might define, not a form Sutura hands you. A thriller may want a clock on every scene. A braided novel may want to know which strand each scene belongs to. A first draft may want nothing at all.

Scene properties use the same types as a Collection’s, relationships included: set a scene’s point of view to the character’s Entry and the link runs both ways.

Use the same scene information in useful views

Once scenes carry properties, the manuscript can be read another way. Under the Manuscript, and under any Group, Sutura shows its scenes as a List, a Table, a Board or a Timeline: every scene with its point of view and place, or the draft laid out by status. The manuscript’s own order stays the order; a View only arranges what is already there.

Moving a scene between the lanes of a status Board changes its status. It never changes where the scene sits in the book. Only the navigator does that.

Complexity remains opt-in

A new project has no scene properties. The Inspector offers a few plain suggestions and otherwise stays quiet; nothing asks to be filled in before you write. Add one property when you find yourself wanting to see it across scenes, and stop there.

Those details stay beside the writing, in the Inspector. The Inspector