Discover your story before you write it.
StoryDNA doesn't write or rewrite a word. It asks the questions every screenplay or novel has to answer, and your own answers become the story you write from.
Your ideas stay private: never shown to anyone else, never read by our team, and never used to train AI.
Just love stories? Read our take on techniques writers often missWhere StoryDNA fits
The app you open before Final Draft or Scrivener.
Your writing app is built for the pages. StoryDNA is built for the story behind them. Work out your characters, theme and plot here, then open your writing app knowing what you're writing.
StoryDNA grew out of years of research into how great stories work. Here's one of its questions, the way you'd see it:
From the Antagonist Dynamic builder
What makes your antagonist's most admirable quality the very thing that makes them dangerous?
The most compelling antagonists are not purely evil but possess genuine virtues that make them both sympathetic and terrifying. This element asks you to identify how your antagonist's most admirable quality paradoxically becomes the very thing that makes them dangerous. A character who genuinely loves their family might be willing to destroy worlds to protect them. Someone whose loyalty runs deep might commit atrocities in service to that devotion. Intelligence, compassion, determination — any positive trait can become what might be called venom when taken to its extreme.
Examples 10
- Misery (1990)
Nurturing instinct so intense it becomes imprisonment and mutilation
Why: Annie Wilkes genuinely wants to care for Paul, and that same devotion makes her captivity feel like love.
Ready to try it on your own screenplay or novel?
Start free for 14 daysHow your story takes shape
Build your story's unique DNA.
Questions that draw your story out.
Carefully researched questions, grouped into Story Builders that each work on one layer of your story, like why the middle drags or why the antagonist feels flat. Your answers become the story's unique DNA.
Every answer connects.
Each answer sits beside the earlier ones it touches, so you can see how one choice ripples through your story.
Learn how stories work, on your own story.
Every question is backed by a deep look at why it's crucial to storytelling and how to think about it, with examples from films and books.
Everything falls into place.
Your characters, your world, your theme and your plot take shape as one deeply woven whole, where every part is both logical and meaningful.
Together, your answers make a fingerprint no other story has, so you can sit down to write knowing what you're writing, and excited to write it.
What you leave with
An outline you can write from.
When you're ready, the Scene Builder helps you lay your story out scene by scene, using your own answers. The Full Outline puts it all in one document you can export as plain text, Markdown, PDF, or Word, then write from in Final Draft, Scrivener, or whatever you write in.
The Full Outline window, where you export your finished outline:
Reports and insights
Your story consultant, on call.
Everything so far is the creative loop at the heart of StoryDNA. But now that AI is all around us, we asked how it could help a writer without replacing one. So we added reports that read your choices like a well-read story consultant, giving you feedback and helping you see how your choices could come together.
A report for every builder
When you finish a builder, ask for its report. It looks at the choices you just made, what they make possible, and what you might want to consider.
Story Insights
A shelf of reports that each read your whole story from a different angle, like your protagonist and antagonist side by side, your theme across the four acts, or your turning points.
The Essentials Blueprint
When you finish Essentials, it tells your story back to you from beginning to end, then shows where it stands right now.
All your story ideas
A shelf for every story you want to tell.
Each story idea gets its own project. Run them all through the same questions, see which ones come alive, and pick any of them back up whenever you like.
Your Stories, the first page you see when you sign in:
- 72%
The Lighthouse Keeper
Novel · 74 of 103 answered
- 85%
Night Shift
Screenplay · 88 of 103 answered
- 30%
Salt and Iron
Fantasy novel · 31 of 103 answered
- 6%
Untitled heist idea
Screenplay · 6 of 103 answered
Think of StoryDNA as your story lab: a place to keep every idea you have, try each one out, and see how it all connects.
Your shelf stays private: never shown to anyone else, never read by our team, and never used to train AI.
It all starts with an easy story sketch.
Sketch the basics of a story idea, then see where your choices could lead. If it clicks, a whole world opens up.
The first 14 days are free, with no credit card.
Common questions
Got a story idea you keep coming back to?
Put it on your shelf, free