The Writer's Room

The Writer's Room is where your story bible actually lives, and the page you will spend the most time on. The panel down the right-hand side holds your characters, places and props. Click one to open it, then edit any field, add a picture, or see where a fact came from. This is the only place these records are edited.

What you can create#

The Writer's Room makes nine kinds of record, each with its own editor: Series Bible, Character, Location, Prop, Story arc, Secret, Draft, Role and Reference. The Series Bible can be started on an empty story, so you can begin with the overview before anything else exists.

Characters carry the most: as well as their own fields, they hold skills, ties to other characters, and pictures.

Working by keyboard#

You can build a bible from a blank page without touching the mouse.

The chooser letters are b Series Bible, c Character, l Location, p Prop, a Story arc, s Secret, d Draft, r Role and f Reference. To make ten characters in a row, press Ctrl+N, then Enter, ten times.

History: every Save is kept#

Every time you press Save, that save is kept in the record's History. Nothing is overwritten and lost.

Open any record you have saved before and press History, beside Save. You'll see a list of saves, newest first, and for each one you can choose:

• As it stood shows the record exactly as it was at that save.
• Compare with now shows which fields differ from the current version.
• Restore this save brings those fields back.

A restore is itself a new save, so restoring never destroys anything: you can always go back to the version you restored over. Before anything changes you see a preview of what will be restored, and anything that can't be brought back is listed. A restore never changes a record's name or its canon status.

Pictures, a character's skills and a character's ties are part of the save too. They wait for Save like any other field, and a restore brings them back. A tie between two characters is saved on both of them.

For records that came in by ingesting your notes, History starts with the state they arrived in, so it never begins mid-story. Some actions take effect immediately rather than waiting for Save, such as merging two records. Those leave a note in History, so the list always explains what happened.

Provenance: where a fact came from#

Open a character, place or prop and look for the Provenance tab. For facts that were read in from your notes, it shows which passage, in which document, each fact came from. Facts you typed yourself are yours.

A fact the text stated is treated differently from one the AI inferred. Inferred facts stay visibly unconfirmed until you bless them in Ratification. See Ingesting your notes.

Merging two records#

Sometimes one person or thing has ended up as two records: Torch and Lantern are the same object, but no tool could guess that. To combine them:

Nothing is chosen for you, and a merge can be undone afterwards from the Identity Queue page.

Writing chapters#

The middle of the Writer's Room has two tabs for working on chapters:

• Write from the bible builds a brief of what your bible says about the chapter, which you can export with Export the notes… and use with any AI. See The chapter brief loop.
• Chapter chat is a conversation about the selected chapter. It runs on the provider you have chosen: Claude, Gemini or a local Ollama model. It asks before it sends anything. See AI providers and costs.

Everything else in the Writer's Room, including creating, editing, History, Provenance and merging, needs no key at all.

Related#

• Tutorial: Your first story
• Reference tools