Creative people create the future. It is easy for those of us who build things to think we are the ones doing that, and we are not: without your stories and your images there would be nothing to aim at. A generation watched a crew flip open a handheld communicator and grew up to build one. You supply the imagination, the structures, the societies and the goals the rest of us are raised on. Then you are handed a word processor and a calendar to hold it all in.
A hundred and eighty thousand words. A character who cannot know a particular thing until well past the middle, and who was in the room in an early scene you have since rewritten. A subplot you promised in the fourth chapter and have not thought about since. You know all of it, in the sense that you could tell somebody if they asked today.
Or: four locations, two of which need permission and one of which you can only get on a Tuesday. A contributor who has appeared before and said something you now want to contradict. Three edits in flight, a sponsor obligation that has to go out before the end of the month, and a back catalogue large enough that you genuinely cannot remember whether you have already covered this.
Different crafts, identical failure. It surfaces as a thread that was set up and never paid off, or a detail that contradicts one from eighty pages earlier, and it is always found by somebody else, usually after it is too late to change. Not because you are disorganised, but because you have been asked to hold a web in a format that only does lines.
A character is not eighty mentions scattered through a manuscript. A location is not a line in three call sheets. Here each one is a single object you can open, and everything it touches is listed on it: every thread it runs through, every episode it appears in, everyone it has met, everything it has been promised. You write the connection once, when you notice it, and it is there for the rest of the project.
What that buys you is the ability to see an absence. A thread that was set up and never paid off is a node with something coming in and nothing going out, and it is visible rather than remembered. A character who has been off the board for eleven chapters looks like it. Two things that contradict each other are two lines meeting somewhere they should not. The continuity problems that get found in a structural edit or a comment section stop needing to be found, because they are shaped differently from everything around them.
And you can put the actual material on it. Drag the reference photographs onto the location, the release form onto the contributor, the interview recording onto the person, and they sit there and open in whatever normally opens them. The research does not go into a folder named after the month you did it.
For a novel: people, places, threads, objects and the events that move them. A character joined to the thread they carry, the people they know and the thing they are hiding. A promise made to the reader joined to the scene that sets it up and the scene that is supposed to pay it off, so an unfinished one is obvious at a glance. The knife joined to whoever has held it, in order. It is a series bible, except that you did not have to write it as a document, because it assembles out of the notes you were making anyway.
For a series: episodes, contributors, locations, formats and obligations. A location joined to the two episodes it serves and the permission it needs. A contributor joined to what they have already said on camera. A sponsor joined to the deliverable and the date it has to clear. A topic joined to the three videos that have circled it and the one that finally landed, which is also how you stop repeating yourself at scale.
Both are the same object with different nouns, which is why they are on one page. And in both cases the useful thing is not the picture. It is being able to open one item and see, without thinking, everything that depends on it.
There is structured data underneath, because that is what makes the connections work. You will probably never need to look at it, and it is one keypress to hide the panels where it lives. Nothing is required, nothing is validated, and nothing nags you for leaving a field empty. What most people actually use is a name, some notes, and a line drawn to something else.
It does not want your manuscript, your screenplay or your footage. Keep writing wherever you write and keep cutting wherever you cut. Nothing is imported, nothing is migrated, and your notes are plain text files in a folder you chose on your own machine, which means stopping tomorrow costs you nothing and loses you nothing. There is no account, no sign-in and no telemetry, so nothing about an unfinished project goes anywhere at all.
It will not write for you, plot for you, or tell you what happens next, and it is not trying to. That was always your job and it remains the good part. This is for the other job, the one nobody mentions when they describe the work.
At some point somebody outside asks for the shape of the thing. An editor taking a structural pass and needing to know what the fourth chapter was setting up. An agent trying to describe a series to a publisher. A collaborator joining book two. An editor cutting an episode who needs to know what has already been said on camera by the person on screen. A sponsor who wants to see where their deliverable actually sits.
Every one of them is asking for the same document, and it is the one nobody writes because writing it is a week of work that produces nothing new. A space can be sent as a link or a single file that opens in an ordinary browser, navigable, with the notes and the reference material attached where they belong. They install nothing, sign up for nothing and pay nothing, which is the only version of this that works when you are sending it to somebody who reads submissions all day.
You do not begin with a blank screen. A Template is a starting vocabulary, the kinds of thing that exist in a job and the ways they relate, so the categories are already there and already coloured when you make a space.
Being straight about it: none of the sixty-one Templates is built for fiction, so a novel starts from an empty vocabulary or from one of these bent out of shape. That takes about ten minutes, since a category is a name and a colour, and most people writing fiction end up with Character, Place, Thread, Object and Event within the first sitting. Nothing stops you using more than one Template in a space.
Everything on this page except the sending is on the free plan, permanently, with no account, no card and no trial quietly running out. Attachments are not limited. Nothing is withheld until you upgrade.
Spaces are unlimited and the bridges between them are free, so a long project becomes a few linked spaces rather than one enormous one: the cast in the first, the threads and the timeline in the second, the research in the third, all joined and all navigable. Each holds twenty nodes, which is roughly a cast, or a season.
The paid tier is $120 a year and buys exactly one thing: sending a space to somebody who does not have Filamental. That is the submission, the editor, the collaborator and the sponsor, and if none of those apply to you yet, you never need to pay. We would rather say so than sell you something you will not use.
No. There is structured data underneath, because that is what makes the connections work, and you can go your whole life without opening it. Panels you do not want are hidden with a single key, and the parts most people actually use are a name, some notes and a line drawn to something else. Nothing is required to be filled in, and nothing nags you for leaving it empty.
No, and you should keep them. It does not want your manuscript, your screenplay or your footage, and it will not format, export or render anything. It sits beside the tool you make the work in and holds what the work is made of: the people, places, threads, episodes, promises and obligations that recur, and how they relate to each other.
Yes, and the shape is almost identical. A location used in three episodes, a contributor who has appeared twice, a sponsor obligation that has to land before a date, a piece of footage shot for one thing and usable in another: those are recurring things with relationships between them, which is the same problem a novel's cast and threads present. The vocabulary changes and nothing else does.
No. Everything is Markdown files with a few lines of structured data at the top, sitting in an ordinary folder you chose, on your own machine. Stop using it tomorrow and every note you wrote is still readable in any text editor on any computer. There is no database, no export step and no account, so there is nothing to be locked out of.
Yes, and it is the one thing the paid tier buys. Publisher turns a space into a document you send as a link or a single HTML file, and it opens in an ordinary browser with the structure navigable inside it. Whoever receives it installs nothing, creates no account and pays nothing, which matters when you are sending it to somebody who reads submissions all day and will not download software.
For most, nothing. The Personal plan is free permanently, with no account and no card, and everything involved in building a structure and working inside it is on it. Spaces are unlimited and the bridges joining them are free. The paid tier is $120 a year and buys sending a space to somebody who does not have Filamental, which for this work means an editor, an agent, a collaborator or a sponsor.
One evening and the thing you are already working on is enough to find out whether this suits how you think. Free, no account, no card, and nothing that leaves your machine.