“Every writer has found the hole
in the third act
— and had to rewrite the first.”
CanonBoard is where you build a world, connect it, and find where it breaks.
Your world, before the first scene.
CanonBoard is a story canvas for anyone building a world. It lives as connected cards — characters, locations, rules, plot points, a timeline — and the tools read that world back to you, flagging the contradictions that break a story before you have written it.
Prose returns no errors.
Code has a compiler. A spreadsheet has a formula that breaks loudly. A story world has neither: you can write a character’s age in one document and the rule that depends on it in another, and nothing anywhere will tell you they disagree. The contradiction is not hidden — it simply has nobody to report to.
So it stays silent until somebody finds it. A rule established in the pilot quietly stops being true in episode nine. The lighthouse keeper’s daughter drowned at nine and came back at nine, and eleven years later somebody writes her a birthday. Found at the table read it is embarrassing; found in the third act of a finished draft it is a rewrite.
CanonBoard is the layer before that. The world lives as connected cards, the engine reads all of it at once, and the contradictions surface while they are still cheap — before a scene has been written around them.
From a blank canvas to a world that holds.
A project is yours and private. You build it, you invite the people you want in it — and nobody else can see it, list it, or find it.
Characters, locations, objects, the rules that cannot be broken. Type what you already know; nothing has to be finished, and nothing is published.
Link a character to a place, an object to its owner, an event to a date. The canvas holds the relationships, not just the notes.
Conflict Detection reads the whole world and flags what cannot both be true — dead-then-alive, two places at once, a broken rule — with a reason for each.
Resolve the clash on the canvas, where it costs a card. After the first draft, the same fix costs a rewrite.
Canon Canvas is free to start, and the power tools run on Canon Credits. There is nothing else to buy, nothing is sold on top of your work, and nothing you build here is published by us. CanonBoard is funded by subscriptions.
A document cannot check itself.
Prose is the wrong shape for a world that has to stay consistent. Structure is what lets software help you, and it is the only difference between a bible you maintain and a bible that maintains itself.
Every part of the world is a card
Characters, locations, lore, world rules, timeline entries and relationships are typed objects on one infinite canvas — not headings in a document that only you can navigate.
And every card knows the others
Because the cards are typed, the engine can read the world as a graph rather than as prose. That is what makes the map, the timeline and the contradiction scan possible at all.
So the world can be stress-tested
Conflict Detection cross-references the whole canon and surfaces contradictions in plain English — a character dead in one place and alive in another, a rule broken three chapters later.
Secrets stay sealed.
The Locked Vault holds the parts of the world nobody else gets to see — including the engine. A mystery you have already solved is not a contradiction, and it is not training data.
And it is yours to take.
Full Export produces a formatted document of the entire world whenever you want one. You own your canon, entirely and unambiguously; nothing here is a lock-in.
Every tool, in full, on the features page.
Five documents is not a world.
Open a world to an audience and every soft spot in it becomes public. Most worlds live in five places — Notion, Google Docs, a whiteboard, and two notebooks. A character's age lives in one file, the rule that depends on it in another, and the timeline that breaks them both in a third. Nothing is wrong, exactly. It's just that nothing is checked.
So the contradictions stay silent until somebody finds one. A rule established in season one quietly stops being true in season three. The lighthouse keeper's daughter drowned at nine and came back at nine, and eleven years later somebody writes her a birthday. In a private document that is an embarrassment at the table read. In a public room it is the thing your audience is writing against.
So underneath every group is Canon Canvas. Your canon lives as connected cards on an infinite canvas, and the engine reads the whole thing and flags the contradictions that break stories — including the ones that just arrived as an entry.
From blank canvas to a living world, in four moves.
Drop cards on the canvas — characters, locations, world rules, lore and plot points.
Map every relationship, and lay every event out in in-world time, not episode order.
Run Conflict Detection over the whole world. It flags contradictions in plain English.
Lock spoilers in the Vault, rewind any decision, and export the whole world in one click.
Every part of it exists to keep the canon coherent.
A pannable, zoomable whiteboard where the logic, rules, characters, and threads of your world live as connected cards.
Every connection in your world, drawn. One navigable graph, every edge labeled. Pull one node, see what breaks.
Every event in in-world time, not episode order. Age inconsistencies and continuity breaks surface automatically.
Track every storyline across the world — where each one opens, tangles, and pays off — so nothing gets dropped between seasons.
Cross-references your entire world against your canon and surfaces every contradiction in plain English, with an explanation.
It interviews you one question at a time and shapes your answers into structured canon. It never writes your story.
Drop in a script, treatment, or doc and CanonBoard builds your board automatically — characters, locations, rules, timeline, extracted and connected.
Season-two reveals, hidden motivations, the twist. Lock them in the Vault and the engine never flags them — and the crowd never sees them.
Every decision logged. Rewind the world to any previous state — including the one from three weeks ago that was right.
One click generates a complete, formatted document of every element in your world — ready for a studio, a network, or your own team.
The full breakdown lives on the features page.
- A canvas for the layer before the script
Characters, locations, objects, world rules, plot points and a timeline, as typed cards with the relationships drawn between them — one navigable map of what is true.
- A story-logic canvas
An open infinite canvas where the logic, rules, characters, and threads of your world live as connected cards — one navigable map instead of five scattered docs.
- A stress test
Conflict Detection reads your full world and cross-references every entry against your canon — dead-then-alive characters, broken rules, two people in one place at once — and flags each contradiction in plain English with an explanation.
- A single source of truth
Live cursors, role permissions, change history. The people you invite to your project work from one world — and nobody outside it sees anything.
- Not a writing app
No screenplay editor, no prose tools, no sentence-level anything. You write where you write.
- Not a ghostwriter
Nothing here generates story content or suggests plot decisions. It asks. You answer. That's the whole deal.
- Not a wiki
Storage is table stakes. A filing cabinet doesn't tell you the file in drawer three contradicts the file in drawer nine.
- Not a note-taking tool
Notion is great at being Notion. CanonBoard is purpose-built for story architecture — cards know they're characters, rules, and threads.
It doesn't write for you. It interviews you — and organizes what you already know.
Your voice is the product. Ours would just be in the way.
Built for the people holding a world in their head.
Screenwriters and showrunners, novelists with a series to protect, comic and manga creators with continuity measured in years, game narrative teams, and anyone building a world bigger than the one thing they are writing in it. Solo, or with the people they invite.
Alongside them, the people they bring in: a co-writer, a script editor, a producer who needs to see the world without the keys to it. Team seats are the only way anybody else reaches a project, and the owner sends every invitation.
Canon Canvas is on every plan, including Free, which holds one project and one seat; Core is $7/mo for three seats and the power tools, and Pro is $19/mo for unlimited projects and eight seats. The power tools — Conflict Detection, Refine and Smart Import — run on Canon Credits, which both paid plans include. Full Export is free on every plan: whatever you build here, you can take with you.
What writers are saying.
I really like the idea behind this platform, and I’m already enjoying using it. As a filmmaker, I especially love the storyboard feel of it all, and I’ve already begun setting up a book with an entirely new world, alongside characters that users can literally click on to learn more about. It feels very interactive and makes readers genuinely feel like they’re part of the experience.
The team has also been friendly and supportive, and their enthusiasm for what they’re building is infectious. Overall, this is a top-tier platform.
One of my favorite parts of writing is brainstorming ideas with other creative thinkers, and I love that CanonBoard makes it so easy to collaborate on publicly-available stories. It’s like having access to an online writer’s room whenever you want!
The safe space from writer’s block and decreased creativity! Truly, here you will find no shortage of ideas, stories, themes, or plots. You can always receive and view others’ ideas for your project and intertwine them with your own creative writing, and truly give your viewers the best, most interactive creative process for your medium.
What writers ask before they start.
What exactly is CanonBoard?
A canvas for the layer before the script. You build your world as connected cards — characters, locations, objects, world rules, plot points, a timeline — and the tools read that world back to you: contradictions flagged, relationships drawn, everything findable. You decide what is real here; you write it wherever you write.
What does "pre-writing" actually mean?
The layer before the script: who your characters are, what your world's rules permit, how every thread connects, what happens when. Most tools start checking your world after you've written it. CanonBoard works before — when contradictions are cheap to fix.
What types of cards can a project have?
CanonBoard's world elements are typed cards: characters, locations, lore, world rules, objects, plot points, timeline events, and relationships. Because cards know what they are, the engine can stress-test the whole world for contradictions and draw the relationships between everything.
Who can see my project?
Only you and the people you invite, with the role you give them — view, comment, or edit. Projects are private, full stop: there is no public listing and no way for a stranger to find one. The Locked Vault is tighter still, sealed even from the people you have invited to view.
Can I get everything out?
Always. Full Export produces a formatted PDF of your entire world on every plan, including Free. Your world is portable by design.
Your world, stress-tested. Before you write it.
Every contradiction you catch on the canvas is one you never have to write your way out of. Free to start, and your world stays private.