Writing your story has never been easier

Fabula helps you analyze, organize and build your stories in the most effective way.

Start writing with Fabula

Fabula reached its goal almost 4x over on Kickstarter – it’s that popular

Check out why hundreds of writers chose Fabula!

A framework for fiction writers

Fabula is a tool consisting of 40 cards which you can utilize wherever you want, helping you to analyze, organize, and build your stories.

You can place Fabula on walls, tables, floors or any other available surface, with the help of adhesive putty or tape. Each card is like a box to fill, so you can just arm yourself with post-its and a pen, and start inventing!

The potential

With Fabula you can basically build every kind of story. From the simplest tales to the most complex movies, from the most profound literature to the episodes of a TV serie.

Composition

In the Fabula deck you'll find:

11 ASSETS cards;
18 HERO'S DEVELOPMENT cards;
11 EDITING cards;
a booklet with instructions.

The Assets

The ASSETS cards are the blue cards in your deck and they help you organise the main ingredients of your story.

They give you the right questions, for example:

Who's the hero?
Who are the allies?
And the enemies?
What's the concept of the story?

Use the ASSETS cards to build the universe of your story, sticking notes, maps, images, and whatever else comes to your mind around the cards.

The Hero's Development Cards

The Hero structure is a pattern that can be found in many different stories. It could be considered as an archetypical path that underlies every story told, first studied by Vladimir Propp, then by lots of other scholars such as Joseph Campbell, David Adams, Christopher Vogler.

There are 15 cards which represent the HERO’S STEPS, the typical steps of the characters. If you think about it you can find them in most movies and books:

ORDINARY WORLD: the hero is still in his familiar environment– Neo is an unsatisfied hacker looking for an answer;
CALL TO ACTION: something happens to change the balance – He follows the "white rabbit";
REFUSAL OF THE CALL: the hero is hesitant– He should climb the roof but he's afraid;
MEETING THE MENTOR: he meets a mentor who guides him – He sees Morpheus and he's offered the two pills;
CROSSING THE FIRST THRESHOLD: he finally decides to enter the new world – He chooses the right pill and the real action begins!

Then we have the meeting with ALLIES and ENEMIES, we have TRIALS, the FULFILLMENT of the hero, the ORDEAL in which he gets what he is looking for and the story develops until the RESOLUTION, good or bad.

Although most stories have just one hero, you will have three CHARACTERS cards. By placing them on the left of your HERO’S STEPS cards, you will be able to manage the development of three different characters.

The Editing Cards

And what If you have lots of characters or you want to play with the time of your story? Think about the movies by Christopher Nolan, for example, or the complexity of novels like Game of Thrones.

The EDITING cards are based on the Three Act Structure and with them you can act like a director who orders the events of your story. It's like a recap focused on the audience: