Rewritten
Title Working Concept: The Unfinished Job
Beginning:
- Elena has lived quietly for 8 years under a new name, haunted by the one contract she walked away from.
- Her old handler resurfaces: the target she spared is now being hunted by someone else, and only she knows how to protect him.
Middle:
- Elena reluctantly re-enters her old world, discovering the new threat has ties to the organization she thought she'd escaped.
- Protecting the target forces her to confront why she spared him in the first place — a decision tied to her own past.
- A betrayal from someone she trusted exposes her cover and endangers both of them.
End:
- Elena chooses to finish the job her own way — not killing, but dismantling the organization that made her a weapon.
- She and the target part ways, her identity permanently changed by finally closing the loop.
About this tool
A lot of stories die at the one-line-idea stage because the jump from premise to structure feels too big. This tool takes whatever fragment you have — a character, a situation, a "what if" — and expands it into a working outline with a beginning, middle, and end, plus the key plot beats connecting them. It's meant for the drafting stage before you write a single line of prose, when you need something to react to rather than a blank page. Novelists, screenwriters, and game writers all use this shape of tool differently, but the core job is the same: turn a spark into a skeleton.
Frequently asked questions
How much of the idea do I need to provide?+
Even a single sentence works. The more specific details you include (setting, character traits, tone), the more tailored the outline will be.
Will this write the actual scenes for me?+
No — it produces a structural outline of beats, not prose. Use the writing-prompt-to-first-paragraph tool if you want drafted text.
Can I use this for screenplays as well as novels?+
Yes, the beat structure works for both. It won't format it in screenplay format, but the story logic translates directly.