Story architecture glossary

The surface where a script under development is read and written. It holds the script as it stands, the round currently open on it, and the entries competing for the next beat. Anyone on the Board can read the script, submit one entry for the open slot, and rank the entries other writers submitted.

Reading, voting and writing are open on every plan, including Free. What a Canon Credit changes is one thing, and it is not the outcome — it lets a writer submit without voting first, on any plan that has credits. The ranking that decides a round never sees what anybody pays.

One cycle of writing on a script: a slot is opened for the next beat, writers submit one entry each, the Board ranks the entries against each other, and the highest-ranked beat joins the script. The writer who wrote it is credited on the script and paid a cash prize, announced with each round.

The prize is funded by CanonBoard out of subscriptions and paid to the writer — it is not money collected from an audience, and no amount of spending affects the ranking. Most rounds are free to enter; where one charges, the fee is a few Canon Credits.

One writer's version of the beat a round is asking for. Entries are written against the script as it stands, ranked blind against each other by the Board, and the highest-ranked one becomes canon. Every writer may submit one entry per round.

An entry is a piece of writing, not a proposal: it is the actual scene, in screenplay format, ready to join the script if the Board ranks it first.

The order a round's drafts finish in, worked out from the Board's upvotes — every reader upvotes the drafts they would make canon, and the most-upvoted draft finishes first. Rankings are what decide a round, and upvoting is how a writer earns their own submission: you read and judge before you are read and judged.

Ranking is tier-blind by design. No plan, purchase or balance changes the order drafts are served in or the weight a vote carries — if paying could affect exposure, paying would buy the prize.

The set of facts, events and rules a story treats as true. Canon is not everything that has been written — it is the subset the work is committed to, which is why deciding what enters it is an editorial act rather than a filing one.

A beat entering the script as canon. On CanonBoard this is what winning a round means: the Board ranks the entries, the highest-ranked beat joins the script, and its writer is credited on the script and paid the round's prize.

Distinct from a creator simply accepting a submission. The decision belongs to the ranking, not to any one person — which is why the scoring is tier-blind and why a writer cannot buy their way up it.

The next unit of story a script needs — a scene, a turn, a moment that moves it. A round opens on one beat at a time, which is what makes a script writable by a room rather than by a committee: everybody is answering the same question.

The infinite canvas a project's world is built on — characters, locations, objects, world rules, lore, plot points and the relationships between them, laid out as connected cards rather than as a document.

Canon Canvas is part of Core and Pro. Reading a script, ranking a round and entering one need no plan at all.

The unit a paid plan spends on work the platform does for you. Credits let a writer skip a round's voting requirement and submit straight away, and they pay a round's entry fee where it has one; the same credits run the power tools — Smart Import, Refine and Conflict Detection.

Credits are a shared pool per account rather than per seat. The monthly grant does not roll over; credits bought in a pack do not expire while a paid subscription is active.

A project CanonBoard has taken on editorially and stands behind. Originals are the projects that are public, readable and open to the Board; every other project on the platform is private to the people working on it.

The mark is set by CanonBoard, never by a creator. A badge somebody can award themselves says nothing about the work.

A constraint the story world obeys — how the magic works, what the technology cannot do, what a power costs. World rules are load-bearing in a way most canon is not: breaking one does not merely contradict a fact, it retroactively weakens every scene that respected it.

A systematic scan across an entire story world that surfaces contradictions no single reader happened to notice. It is the one operation where a tool genuinely beats a person: the number of fact pairs that can conflict grows as the square of the facts, and human working memory does not grow at all.

In CanonBoard this reads your canvas, not your script. It can only check what has been written down.

The gradual divergence between what a story world was established to be and what later work assumes it is. Drift is rarely a single contradiction; it is an accumulation of small, individually reasonable choices that no longer add up.

A deliberate change to established canon that reinterprets what was already published rather than contradicting it outright. A retcon is an editorial decision with a cost: every scene that depended on the old fact has to still work under the new one.

The discipline of keeping a story's established facts consistent across everything written in it — the job of noticing that a character cannot be in two places, that a rule was broken, that an age no longer adds up.

A contradiction or unexplained gap that a reader or viewer notices. Worth distinguishing from a continuity error in general: every plot hole is a continuity failure that escaped, but most continuity failures are caught before anyone outside the production ever encounters them.