Frequently Asked

Narrative Arc is a native iOS and macOS guided memoir platform for adults who want to capture their life stories for family legacy but aren't writers. Voice-first input, prompts drawn from narrative therapy principles, an interactive timeline and relationship map, and a printable book at the end.

A narrative arc is the shape of a story. The same way a novel has a beginning, middle, and end, a life has chapters that bend toward something. Narrative Arc helps you find that shape in your own life without requiring you to write it like a novel.

Adults aged 45 to 75 who want to document their life intentionally for family legacy but have never thought of themselves as writers. Often the purchaser is an adult child buying it as a gift for an aging parent. The most common moments people start: a parent's death, a grandchild's birth, a health diagnosis, retirement, a milestone birthday.

It is not a daily journal. It is not a social network. It is not a cloud-first product. It does not analyze, score, or repackage your stories with AI. It does not require you to type. It does not put your voice or your words on someone else's server.

Storyworth sends you 52 weekly questions and binds the answers into a hardcover. The result reads like a Q&A transcript, and it requires you to type. Day One is a daily journal with no legacy structure, no timeline, no chapter shape. Narrative Arc sits in the gap: voice-first for non-writers, structured around the shape of a life, and built to produce a memoir worth keeping.

Pricing is not yet finalized. Likely a one-time App Store purchase with optional add-ons for premium exports (printed hardcover, video compilation). Your stories themselves will never be behind a subscription paywall.

Not for the core experience. Recording, transcription, prompts, photos, timeline, relationships, and PDF export all work fully offline. An internet connection is only required if and when you choose to publish a web-readable copy of your memoir for family.

iOS 17.0 or later (iPhone, iPad). macOS 14.0 Sonoma or later (Apple Silicon or Intel).

Tap + New Story in the Stories toolbar and choose Record a story. Grant microphone and speech permissions if it's the first time, then speak. Words appear as you go, the waveform pulses with your voice, and a timer tracks elapsed time. Tap Stop to save. The title is drawn from your first line. You can rename it later.

Same + New Story menu, choose Write a story. A full-screen editor opens. On macOS, Cmd+Return saves and Esc cancels. Title is drawn from the first line, the same way voice stories work.

Tap Pause to temporarily stop. The recorder safely closes its current session and starts a fresh one when you tap Resume, so anything you said before the pause is preserved even for very long pauses.

At three seconds of silence you'll see a quiet "Listening…" indicator. At thirty seconds, a countdown card appears with a Keep recording button. At sixty seconds of continuous silence the recording auto-finalizes and saves.

Yes. Tap a story to open it. The transcript is read-only by default so accidental keystrokes can't change it. Tap Edit to make it editable (a thicker border signals it's live). Your edits auto-save. Done finishes the edit; Cancel asks before discarding.

No. Speech recognition runs on your device only. Your recordings, transcripts, and stories never leave your phone or Mac unless you explicitly export them.

On your device, in the app's private storage. Settings → Recording shows the total count, total size, and oldest and newest timestamps so you always know what's there.

On your device, in the app's private storage, separate from your phone's photo library. Narrative Arc imports a resized copy when you attach a photo. Your originals are never moved or modified. Settings → Photos shows total count and size.

The next time you open Narrative Arc, it checks the current permission state. If you've revoked access, the app guides you back through the consent screen with a link straight to system Settings.

They're deleted with the story. Profile photos attached to People are stored separately and persist across story deletions.

Open the story. The Photos section sits between the Chapter and Recording cards. Tap Add photos to pick from your library, or Camera on iOS to capture new ones. Up to twenty photos per story.

Right-click a thumbnail on macOS, or long-press on iOS. The menu offers Add caption / Edit caption, Move left / Move right, and Remove photo. iOS also supports drag-and-drop reordering.

Tap any thumbnail. iOS gives you horizontal swipe between photos. macOS gives you chevron buttons plus left and right arrow keys. On both platforms, pinch or double-tap to zoom from 1× to 4×, and the toolbar's ellipsis menu offers Edit caption and Crop. Crop supports Square, 4:3, 16:9, and Freeform ratios.

From the Prompts tab, tap the ellipsis menu and choose Start from a Photo. Pick any photo from your library; Narrative Arc reads its date and shows five prompts ranked by how well they fit the photo's date and the people you mark as being in it. You can add a new person or write a custom prompt inline. Pick Record or Write when you're ready. The photo and tagged people auto-attach to the resulting story.

Full identity: name, category (Family, Friend, Colleague, Partner, Mentor, or other plus your own custom labels), email, phone (auto-formatted), birthday, notes, and a profile photo. Categories you type as "other" become reusable, so you can pick them from the menu next time.

Open a person and tap Edit. The profile photo row at the top offers Set or Change, which opens a picker that combines your photo library and every photo across stories this person is already tagged in.

Yes. People tab → Import from Contacts. Pick a contact and Narrative Arc pulls the name, primary email, primary phone, birthday, and profile photo into the edit form so you can confirm before saving. Category defaults to Friend; adjust it in the form.

Five layouts: List (default, searchable), Lifelines (a horizontal timeline of when each person appeared in your stories. Coming in a future update), Constellation (a single map of everyone in your memoir; see below), Cards (photo-forward grid), and Family (only people tagged as Family). Switch between them in the toolbar's layout menu.

Distance from the center reflects how many stories that person is in (closer to the middle means they shaped your memoir more). Color tint reflects their category: warm ochre for family, deep red for partner, gold for mentor, softer ochres for friends and colleagues. Where they sit around the ring reflects chronology, with the earliest person in your life at the top and sweeping clockwise to the most recent. Tap a person to open their dossier.

Open the person's detail view, tap Edit in the toolbar, then Delete person at the bottom of the form. Deleting a person removes them from every story they appeared in but leaves the stories themselves intact.

The Prompts tab shows fifteen categories (Childhood, Family Traditions, Career, and others). Tap a category to browse, tap a prompt to see the full question with optional Story Starter sentences. Choose Record or Write to start a guided session with the prompt pinned at the top. After saving, you can edit the transcript right away. Prompts you complete are marked used, and follow-up prompts from the same category are suggested.

Yes. From the Prompts toolbar's ellipsis menu, choose Create Custom Prompt. Pick a category and write your question. Custom prompts appear in the library alongside built-in ones.

From the Prompts toolbar's ellipsis menu, choose Random Prompt. It picks an unused prompt at random and opens it. It never suggests a prompt you've already completed.

Yes. In a category list, swipe right on any prompt to star it. Filter to your starred prompts using the Favorites segment at the top of the category view.

Open the story and find the When this happened card. Tap Add date (or Change) to open the picker. Five precisions: exact day, month and year, season and year (Summer 1987), year alone, or a range of years (1990 to 1995). Undated stories still appear in the Stories list and the Timeline's Undated bucket.

Open the story and tap Tag a person in the People in this story card. Toggle names from the list, or use Create new person to add someone inline (they're auto-tagged on the story). Tap any chip to remove that person.

Yes. Story detail has a Tags card with the same picker pattern as People. Tags appear as chips on story list rows. The Stories list has a tag filter at the top, and Settings → Tags exposes rename, delete, and merge.

Yes. The story detail header has a Private toggle. Private stories are filtered out of every PDF, web book, and video by default. You can override on a per-share basis if you want to include them in a specific export.

Open the story and tap Edit in the toolbar. The Delete story button appears at the bottom with a confirmation. Tap Done to exit edit mode and the delete option hides itself again.

Open the Timeline tab → + menu → New chapter. Give it a title, a start year (required), and an optional end year (leave blank for open-ended chapters like "Retirement"). A story belongs to a chapter when its Chapter picker is set to that chapter. That's the single source of truth.

No. A story lives in exactly one chapter. If a story has a date but no chapter assignment, the chapter whose era contains that date will list it as a Suggestion with Add to chapter and Dismiss options. Tap Add to chapter to claim it. Tap Dismiss to stop seeing it as a suggestion there.

The Stories list shows a banner at the top counting how many stories don't have a chapter, with a Show button that filters to just those. The new-story flows also auto-suggest a chapter whenever a story's date narrows to exactly one match.

Era markers are dated reference points on the timeline that aren't themselves stories: things like "Moon landing," "Mom passed," "Moved to Colorado." Add one from the Timeline + menu. They appear inline with stories and chapters in chronological order, with a flag icon.

Tap the funnel icon in the Timeline toolbar. Toggle which content types show (stories, markers, chapters), narrow stories by a specific person or chapter, and set a year range. Active filters show as a banner at the top with a Clear button.

The arrow icon in the toolbar toggles between horizontal decade columns and vertical stacked decades. Default is horizontal on macOS, vertical on iOS. Zoom with Cmd+= / Cmd+- / Cmd+0 on both platforms, or pinch on iOS.

It collapsed into People as a sub-tab. Open People in the sidebar (macOS) or tab bar (iOS), then choose Constellation from the layout menu. Tap a person to open their dossier.

Collaborate is where you invite family and friends to contribute stories to your memoir. Open the tab, tap New invite, and add contributors by name. If you include their email, Narrative Arc sends them an invite via email automatically. If you don't, hand them the link manually via Messages, AirDrop, or any share target.

Yes. Each contributor gets their own invite, their own attribution, and their own one-tap email. Type or pick a contributor, hit enter, type the next one. Submitting sends one invite per chip in parallel.

The invite link works in any browser. They tap the link and land on a one-button page that opens an in-browser recorder. They can record audio and add photos, then send. No account needed.

The link opens the app directly via Universal Links. They land in the recorder with the prompt pinned at the top. Same recording experience they'd use for their own memoir.

Transcription happens on your Mac when you ingest the contribution, using Apple's Speech framework on-device. The contributor's audio is downloaded once, transcribed locally, and the bytes are purged from the backend. Their words never go through a cloud transcription service.

It marks stories that came in via the contribution flow. The badge appears in the story detail header as a large gold capsule, in the Stories list as a compact gold pill, and in chapter "Stories in this chapter" rows. Stories you recorded yourself don't carry the badge.

"Sent X ago" appears once an invite has been delivered, either via the automatic email or via the system share sheet. "NOT SENT" appears on invites you've created but haven't yet shared with the recipient.

Yes. Right-click (or long-press) an invite card and choose Revoke. The invite disappears from your Collaborate tab. If the recipient already submitted a contribution, the attribution still stays. The revoke only stops future submissions.

Yes. The search bar in Stories looks across titles, body text, the people you've tagged, your tags, and on-device keywords (extracted privately, never sent anywhere). After the initial search, narrow results by tag, person, chapter, or era using the filters at the top.

Legacy is your sharing hub on macOS. Three tiles publish your memoir three ways: Book (PDF locally; a web book is coming as part of web publishing), Videos (story / chapter / memoir tier MP4s), and Reader (the web reader. The page generates and the URL is yours to share). Each tile remembers your settings so a subsequent publish happens in one tap. The "..." menu on each tile opens that tile's defaults editor.

Yes. Legacy on iPhone and iPad runs the same publishing hub as macOS — Read (PDF / web book), Watch (memoir film), and Explore (web reader) all work, plus Visibility and Archive. On iPad in landscape the layout matches macOS with a left sidebar; in portrait or on iPhone the tabs sit along the bottom. The macOS workshop still tends to be where most authors do the bulk of their editing because of the bigger screen, but you're no longer stuck waiting until you're at the Mac to publish.

The memoir film renders on-device using Apple's video pipeline (your audio never leaves the iPad). For a memoir with many chapters this can take several minutes. Stay in the Narrative Arc app while it runs — if you background the app the render pauses. When it's done you get a single Share or save (ZIP) button that routes through the iOS share sheet: Save to Files, AirDrop, Mail, Messages all in one menu.

No. Sharing isn't a multi-times-per-session action, so Narrative Arc keeps it as a destination rather than a prominent button on every screen. Visit Legacy when you're ready to publish, whether that's an interim check-in or the final release. The word "publish" intentionally covers both.

Five templates: Classic, Hearth, Relic, Lineage, and Quiet. Preview them in the book builder before publishing. Customize the title, subtitle, optional cover photo, and author line. Each template is intentionally restrained so the book reads like a memoir rather than a graphic-design exercise.

Every time you publish, Narrative Arc records a Snapshot: a timestamp plus the exact selection used. The Legacy tab lists recent snapshots so you can republish later without re-specifying stories, chapters, or cover.

Narrative Arc builds a manifest of your memoir (stories, chapters, photos, audio, people, tags), uploads any new media to private storage, and creates a publication at narrativearc.app/m/<your-memoir-slug>. From the cover landing your family can choose Read (a long-form web book), Watch (the rendered film), or Explore (the read-only Narrative Arc UI in the browser). Republishing the same memoir reuses the same URLs, so your family's bookmarks never break.

A cover landing first, with your name, a portrait, and three roman-numeral entry points: Read, Watch, Explore. Only the modes you've actually published appear. From there they can navigate freely between the three; everything is wired together at the top of every page.

Yes. When you click Open or Publish from a Legacy tile, the browser opens in edit mode with a small Tweaks panel in the corner. You can flip between two cover styles (Editorial / Bound), two book layouts (Magazine / Bound), two timeline shapes (River / Spread), and four People layouts (Cards / List / Lifelines / Dossier). You can also change body text size, density, the audio player skin, pick a different cover photo, and set custom narrator credits per chapter. Hit Save to commit, Discard to revert, or Sign out to leave edit mode. Public visitors see whatever you saved.

Click Open on any Legacy tile and the macOS app reopens the URL with your edit access already attached. There's also a small Sign in link at the bottom of every page; click it and paste your edit token to come back in from another browser or device.

Yes. The Visibility card in Legacy has three options: Off (every URL serves a "currently private" page. Nothing public), Anyone with the link (default; unlisted from search engines), and Password protected (visitors enter your password once and stay signed in for 30 days). Flipping the toggle propagates to the live web pages immediately. No need to republish.

Yes. Click any photo on the Read or Explore pages and it opens a fullscreen viewer with arrow keys (or on-screen chevrons) to move between photos in that story. Press Escape or click outside to close.

Yes, on the Explore page. The sidebar has a search box; type to filter. Each match shows the story title, the chapter it's in, and a short excerpt with your search term in context.

Yes. From the Watch page in edit mode, the panel lets you set a custom narrator name per chapter. Blank reverts to your name. The credit appears on the chapter intro overlay; the underlying video isn't re-rendered, so there's no wait.

In Legacy, right-click the URL row on any tile. The menu offers Copy public link (the regular family-share URL) and Copy edit link (the same URL with your edit token attached. Only share with people who should be able to change settings).

Yes. Open any Person and tap Edit. Scroll to the Links section. There are two URL fields: a Narrative Arc memoir field and a Website field. Anything you paste here becomes a link on the published web version of your memoir — a small gold flame next to their name on the People view, plus a "Read [Name]'s memoir" or "Visit [Name]'s website" button on their dossier card. If both URLs are set, the Narrative Arc memoir wins. Leave both empty to render their name as plain text.

No, and we will never do that. Narrative Arc never tells anyone whether someone else has an account. URLs only appear on a Person if you either typed them yourself in the Person form, or the person shared them through a contribution invite (see below). Discovery requires affirmative sharing by the URL owner.

When you create a contribution invite, you'll see an Allow linking toggle. When on, the recording form (web or in-app) shows the contributor two optional URL fields with consent copy: "Do you want readers of [Your Name]'s memoir to be able to find your story?" If they paste a URL, it lands on the Person row when you ingest their contribution, and from there it surfaces on your published web reader. When the toggle is off, the URL fields don't appear on the recorder at all. The contributor never sees a hint that their URL would be public unless you explicitly opted in first.

Yes. The Person form has a Bio section between Fit and Contact. The bio you write here appears publicly on the dossier card for that person on the web reader. The Contact, Birthday, and Notes sections are device-only and never appear on the published memoir.

The published web reader serves a snapshot of your memoir, not your live local data. After you add or edit a bio or URL on a Person, the Read and Explore tiles in Legacy flip to "Edits since last publish". Republish those formats and the change goes live. The Watch tile won't flip because Watch doesn't display Person info.

Narrative Arc uses Sign in with Apple. The first time you publish, you'll be prompted to sign in. The app uses the Apple ID your device is signed in to.

Open Settings → Account on the Mac or iPad. Tap Sign in with a different Apple ID. Safari opens a Narrative Arc sign-in page where you can sign in with any Apple ID through Apple's web sign-in flow. After signing in, Safari hands you back to Narrative Arc with the new identity attached. This is the only way to use a non-device Apple ID for publishing because iOS's native Sign in with Apple control is hardwired to your device's iCloud account, so we use the browser as a workaround. Your stories stay on the device; only the publishing identity changes.

When your family opens narrativearc.app/m/<your-memoir> they land on a page that introduces you before introducing the memoir. Memoir title, your name, an optional photo of you, your dedication, and an optional short bio. Plus three roman-numeral entry points: Read the book, Watch the film, Explore the archive.

The cover image fronts each medium of your memoir — the book's cover, the film's title slide, the archive intro. The author photo fronts you on the home page. Same picker UI for both; both let you set a focal point per aspect ratio (square / portrait / landscape / 16:9) and zoom in. If you set only a cover image, the home page falls back to using it as the author hero.

Open Memoir → Edit memoir on the Home dashboard. The "About the author" section accepts free text, one to three paragraphs feels right. Leave it blank to suppress the bio block on the web. Republish to push the change to your live page.

A single button on the Visibility card in Legacy that republishes Read, Watch, and Explore one after another. It replaces the "Open" button when at least one format has unpublished edits. The button drives an inline progress card on the Legacy page. You'll see "Read 1/3 → Explore 2/3 → Watch 3/3" walk through. When it's done the card disappears and "Open" is back.

Watch settings (intro card, narrator, transitions, music, Ken Burns intensity, the cover-image-as-backdrop toggle) bake into the rendered film, so they need a republish to take effect. Read and Explore use a live customization panel on the web, so style changes there push immediately without a republish. The tile staleness reflects what each format actually needs.

In Watch defaults → Opening card. When on (and you've set a cover image on the memoir), the very first slide of the rendered film plays your title and eyebrow over the cover image with a darken layer behind the text so it stays legible. When off, the slide uses the existing plain dark canvas. Flipping the toggle only re-renders the first chapter (the one with the memoir intro card baked in). Other chapters reuse from cache.

"Off" takes the whole memoir down. The cover URL, Read, Watch, and Explore all serve a "currently private" page, AND each format is removed from the cover landing's "How to begin" list. Switching back to "Anyone with the link" shows the cover landing again, but no formats appear there until you explicitly republish them. Off means gone; republish means bring it back.

Every story belongs to exactly one chapter. It's the single source of truth for where a story lives in your memoir. Pick from existing chapters or use "Create new chapter…" inline. Done is greyed out until you make a selection so a story can't be saved without a home.

The prompt question carries the story's intent ("Was there a moment in childhood when the world suddenly seemed bigger…"). The first line of a transcript is mid-thought ("I think the first time I realized…") and reads like a stutter when surfaced as a row title. Prompt-originated stories now title from the prompt itself; the transcript stays as the body. You can rename the title manually any time.