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, five scored 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
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
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.
The lesson list keeps growing. New tranches of mapped works — and the lessons built on them — land through the year and arrive in the app you already have. A subscription is not a purchase of what is here today; it is access to the bank as it fills out. Nothing you have already finished is reset by an addition, because mastery is recorded per beat.
2 · Games
Five scored modes, each drilling something a flash card cannot reach — capacity, misfiling, sequence, the split, the page. They read the same beat bank as the rest of the app and none of them touches your flash-card weighting, so playing badly costs you nothing but the score.
Some modes need a framework built a particular way. Where that is true the mode says which, and the app takes you there in one tap.
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.
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 — flagging everything has to lose, or the mode is a coin toss.
Your beats are pinned up the board in order and you name the one above you to climb. The three names offered are drawn from what the framework itself says people confuse this step with — so a wrong answer is a real mistake, not a silly one. The notes are rising underneath.
Cards drift in from the edge and you throw each to the half of the story it belongs to before it reaches the middle. The frameworks that split evenly down the centre are the ones that teach this, so it is offered where the split is real.
A marker sweeps the length of a 110-page script and you stop it where the beat belongs. Close counts, exact counts more, and a span beat wants both ends. Structure is a shape in time, and this is the mode that says so in pages.
No mode is built for that framework yet.
On the board
Every row has exactly as many spaces as that act has beats. The over-card is the lesson: a bloated second act is the commonest structural failure there is, and it is much easier to feel than to be told.
3 · Drills
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
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
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
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
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
Harmon's loop. Order and chaos, clockwise, and the only one of the four that is a circle.
15 beats · film · tv · literature
Snyder's beat sheet, as a page map rather than a wheel, because that is what it is.
14 slots · film · literature
Calvisi's feature sheet, with its own act bands and its own idea of where the middle goes.
25 slots · television
The pilot deck. Built for the job a first episode has to do, which is not the job a film has.
The bank
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
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.
Install it and the whole bank comes with you. On a plane, on the subway, in a room with no signal.
Beats, notes and every drill result live in your browser's own storage. Export a backup whenever you want.
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
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
The whole app on one framework: lessons, quiz, drills, every game, progress, compare and the reference sheet. And it keeps growing — new Story Circle material arrives on the free tier too.
$49 · first year
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
Departmental licences for film schools, MFAs and writing programmes. Seat-based, invoiced, purchase orders fine. Tell me the size of the cohort below.
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
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.
Analyze
You do not need a key to use Storydrills. The beat bank, the lessons, the quiz, the drills, the games, Progress and the exports all work with no key, no account and no signal.
One feature needs one: Analyze, which grades a draft of your own against a framework. It talks to Claude directly from your browser, using your key.
Your draft never touches our servers. It goes from your browser to Anthropic and the verdict comes back. We never see your script, never store it, and could not read it if we wanted to. That is why you bring your own key rather than us bundling one — a screenwriter should not have to send an unproduced script through a stranger's server, and here you never do.
sk-ant- and it is shown once. Lose it and you make a new one.Only what you use. There is no monthly fee on an API account — an idle key costs nothing, indefinitely. One Analyze run sends your draft once and reads one reply. If you never press Analyze, you never spend anything.
api.anthropic.com — when you press Analyze.Stuck? Email me and I will walk you through it. Departments buying seats: ask about managed Analyze instead — API keys are personal credentials and a shared one bills everyone for one person's usage.