Getting Started

Here's what you'll touch in your first few minutes in Poetix: the canvas, your story's overview, and scenes — before you write your first branch.

The canvas

Each scene opens onto a canvas where beats live as cards. Drag an empty part of the canvas to pan, and scroll to zoom. The pill in the bottom-right has zoom-out and zoom-in buttons plus a button that resets zoom to 100%. The + button in the bottom-left adds a new beat.

Setting up your story

The Story Overview page holds four fields: a Thumbnail cover image, an Elevator Pitch (a 30-second hook), a Logline (one sentence capturing the story), and a Synopsis (the full plot and themes). Worth filling these in early — they're also exactly what the AI Co-Writer reads to understand your story.

Scenes

A scene is a container that groups related beats together. Every story starts with one; add more from the + in the sidebar as your story grows. Scenes are purely organizational — a choice can route to a beat in a different scene just as easily as one in the same scene.

Your first branch

With a beat on the canvas, double-click it to open its editor, add a line, then add two choices that each point at a new beat — give each ending its own line, and you have a working branch. If you'd rather build it hands-on, look for the short in-app walkthrough that appears the first time you open a new story — it walks through this exact flow. For the full mental model behind beats, lines, and choices, see Branching with Beats & Choices.