Drill story structure until you can see it
Reading about structure teaches you the vocabulary. Storydrills teaches you the recognition — the thing working writers actually have, and the only part no book can hand over.
Four frameworks. 2,311 beats from 130 real films, television episodes and books. Forty-two guided lessons, two games, timed drills, and a compare view that reads one story against every framework at once.
Private beta · free while it lasts · installs like an app · works offline
The whole thing
Six tabs. Here is every one of them.
No screenshots of a design file. Every clip below is the real app being driven by a script, recorded at phone size, in the order you meet it.
1 · Lessons
Start with the shape, not the jargon
Every framework opens with a walkthrough that draws its own diagram and lights one step at a time, so you see where a beat sits before anyone asks you to name it.
Finish the walkthrough and that framework's lessons unlock. Each runs a set of works in a deliberate order — the most legible sheet first — and a work only counts as done when every one of its beats has been answered correctly at least once.
- 42 lessons, grouped by genre and medium
- Complete arcs, never a scattering of beats
- Mastery is best-ever, so a bad session never costs you ground
- The Quiz and the whole Beat Bank live in this tab too
2 · Games
Modes the quiz cannot be
Writer's Room is a corkboard. Index cards fall one at a time and you pin each to the row for the act it belongs to — and every row has exactly as many spaces as that act has beats. Force one more on and the row is over-carded, which is what a sagging second act feels like from inside.
Story Doctor hands you one story's complete outline, typed up as a script page, with some beats sitting under the wrong slug line. You are not told how many. Some pages are clean, and signing one off unchanged is a win.
- Scored, with combos — and nothing here touches your flash-card weighting
- Top scores tracked per framework in Progress
- Open Road is in development
3 · Drills
The deck itself, until it is yours
Name to job, job to name, number to name. Timed if you want it timed, weighted toward the steps you keep missing, and graded honestly by you — the only grading system that survives contact with your own memory.
Progress is tracked per step, daily, weekly and all time, so you can see which part of the map you actually keep losing.
4 · Analyze
One story, every framework, side by side
Compare Examples lays a story from the bank across all four frameworks at once — the same events, read by four different maps, with the disagreements visible. It is free, instant and works offline, and it is the clearest argument for why four frameworks in one app is worth anything.
Analyze Your Story grades a draft of your own against a framework, and Walk Through a Script reads a whole script against every framework at once and can write the result back into your bank. Those two need your own Claude API key — your draft goes to Anthropic and never touches our servers.
5 · Progress
Which part of the map you keep losing
Lesson completion across every framework at once — not just the one you are drilling — then accuracy step by step, daily, weekly and all time, filtered by medium if you want to know whether it is television that keeps catching you out.
Game records live here too, in their own pane: top score, best combo, sessions. Separate on purpose, because pinning a card under a falling clock is a different signal from answering a flash card and folding them together would quietly poison the spaced repetition.
6 · Settings
Four themes, and they are not skins
Studio dark, studio light, composition book and legal pad. The paper themes write prompts onto the page a line at a time, the way a hand would — and answers never animate, because a reveal that takes a second changes what "did I know it?" means, and that is the one thing this app is measuring.
Everything else lives here too: which frameworks show in the bar, the card timer, your API key, the whole beat bank as an export, and a way to delete every trace of it from the device in one press.
Four frameworks
Taught as their authors wrote them
Not blended into one house theory. Each keeps its own deck, its own vocabulary and its own page targets — including the ones that only make sense for the medium they were written for.
8 steps · film · tv · literature
Story Circle
Harmon's loop. Order and chaos, clockwise, and the only one of the four that is a circle.
15 beats · film · tv · literature
Save the Cat!
Snyder's beat sheet, as a page map rather than a wheel, because that is what it is.
14 slots · film · literature
Story Maps
Calvisi's feature sheet, with its own act bands and its own idea of where the middle goes.
25 slots · television
Story Maps: TV
The pilot deck. Built for the job a first episode has to do, which is not the job a film has.
The bank
Written, not scraped
Every beat in Storydrills was written for Storydrills. Public-domain works are described in new sentences rather than quoted; everything in copyright is described structurally, in the app's own words, at 200 characters or less. You can add your own beats, and they live beside the bundled ones.
How it works
It runs in your browser and stays there
Your work never leaves the device
A licence says what you can use. It does not put your beats on a server — they stay in your browser's own storage, and there is nothing for us to read.
Offline
Install it and the whole bank comes with you. On a plane, on the subway, in a room with no signal.
Your data is yours
Beats, notes and every drill result live in your browser's own storage. Export a backup whenever you want.
One optional online feature
Analyze checks your own draft against a framework. It runs on your Claude API key and talks straight to Anthropic — the only thing here that touches a network, and it never routes through us.
Pricing
Buy it for a year. Keep it forever.
Storydrills is not a subscription that stops working. A licence buys twelve months of new material — new story tranches, new lessons, new modes — and everything you receive in that year is yours to keep, permanently, whether you renew or not.
Free · forever
Story Circle
The whole app on one framework: lessons, quiz, drills, both games, progress, compare and the reference sheet. And it keeps growing — new Story Circle material arrives on the free tier too.
$49 · first year
All four frameworks
Story Circle, Save the Cat!, Story Maps and Story Maps: TV. 2,311 beats across 130 works, 42 lessons, and every tranche published during your twelve months. Renews at $29.
Per seat · annual
Schools and programmes
Departmental licences for film schools, MFAs and writing programmes. Seat-based, invoiced, purchase orders fine. Tell me the size of the cohort below.
What happens if you do not renew
- You keep everything you already received. Every beat, every lesson, every game, all four frameworks — exactly as they stood on the day the licence lapsed.
- You keep everything you wrote. Your own beats, your notes, your progress and your accuracy history are yours, and you can export a backup at any time — lapsed or not — and restore it at any time.
- New tranches stop arriving for the three paid frameworks. Story Circle keeps growing, because that is what the free tier gets.
- Adding beats from a file needs an active licence.
- Renew and the new material lands on your next update. Nothing is lost in between.
The app works offline permanently. A licence is checked when you sign in and then trusted for thirty days without contact — it will never lock you out for being on a plane. Analyze runs on your own Claude API key, which is separate from all of this and costs only what you use.
Checkout opens with the public launch. The beta is free, and everyone in it gets a founding price when it does.
Access
Ask for a way in
Storydrills is in private beta behind an email gate. Tell me who you are and I'll send you a link — no password to make, just a one-time code to the address you give.
Schools and programs: if you're teaching structure and want a licence for a cohort, say so below and describe the group. That conversation is different from the individual one and I'd rather have it properly.