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Stories

Stories are the core of Storywright. A story is a collection of scenes built from a premise, characters, and world details. You plan the structure, then generate each scene with the AI assembling full context — character cards, lorebook entries, memories, continuity state, and summaries — into every prompt.

This guide covers the complete story workflow from creation to export.

Creating a Story

  1. Click + New Story in the Stories sidebar.
  2. A dialog appears with two fields:
  3. Story name — defaults to "Untitled Story." Give it something descriptive.
  4. World — select an existing world or create a new one. The world determines which lorebook entries are available during generation.
  5. Click Create.

Your new story starts empty. From here you fill in the premise, add characters, configure your writing style, and plan scenes.

The Story Workspace

When you select a story, the workspace opens with a two-panel layout:

Wide screens (900px+)

  • Left panel (resizable, 300–500px) — Story setup, scene plan, characters, world info, context panels, and the generation log. The panel also includes a Generation Log — an inline log viewer showing real-time planning and generation activity, useful for debugging slow calls or unexpected behavior.
  • Right panel — The scene editor where you read, write, and revise text.

Narrow screens

On phones and narrow windows, the workspace switches to a tab layout:

  • Plan tab — all left-panel content (setup, scenes, characters, world info)
  • Write tab — the scene editor

Story Setup

The left panel starts with setup fields that define your story's foundation. Everything here feeds into the AI's context during planning and generation.

Premise

A multi-line text area (3+ lines) describing what your story is about. This is the single most important field — the AI uses it as the foundation for planning and every scene generation.

Example: "A retired astronaut living alone on a failing Mars colony discovers a transmission from Earth — the first in twelve years. But the message isn't what she expected: it's a warning to leave."

Write as much detail as you want. The more context you provide, the better the AI plans and generates.

Creative Direction

Optional style hints, mood notes, and constraints that shape the AI's approach without restricting the plot.

Example: "Slow-burn tension, sparse dialogue, focus on isolation and sensory detail. No easy resolutions."

World

A dropdown to select which world's lorebook entries are available during generation. Pick an existing world or create a new one directly from the dropdown.

Writing Style

Choose a named prompt that shapes the AI's tone, structure, and prose style:

Style Description
literary-fiction Rich worldbuilding, dreamy atmospherics, thematic depth
genre-fiction Plot-driven, pacing and tension — thriller, mystery, sci-fi, fantasy
sci-fi Ideas-driven science fiction. Worldbuilding rigor, protagonist competence, human cost of the speculative concept
mystery-thriller Propulsive mystery and thriller. Fair-play clues, escalating stakes, information revealed at the right moment
fantasy Immersive fantasy. Magic with rules, worldbuilding through action, sense of a world beyond the page
humor Comedy-forward, sharp dialogue, absurd situations
romance Character-driven, emotional depth and romantic tension
horror Atmospheric dread, sensory unease, creeping tension
minimalist Sparse prose, Hemingway-style precision
audio-storytelling Written for spoken audio delivery, includes SFX/AMBIENT tags

Word Count

A slider from 500 to 20,000 words in 500-word steps. This controls the overall target length of your story — the AI distributes the word budget across scenes during planning. A 2,000-word story might have 2–3 scenes, while a 10,000-word story could have 10+.

Story Structure

A template that defines how your story is organized. The AI uses this structure when planning scenes:

  • Three-Act — Setup, confrontation, resolution
  • Kishotenketsu — Introduction, development, twist, conclusion
  • Five-Act — Exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, dénouement
  • Hero's Journey — The classic mythic arc
  • Save the Cat — Blake Snyder's beat-driven structure
  • Story Circle — Dan Harmon's eight-step cycle
  • Seven-Point — Hook, plot turns, pinches, midpoint, resolution
  • Fichtean Curve — Rising crises building to climax
  • In Medias Res — Start in the middle of the action
  • Vignette Collection — Loosely connected standalone scenes
  • Freeform — No imposed structure

Narrative POV

Choose how the story is told. Nine options, each with a detailed description shown in the dropdown:

  • Default — the AI chooses based on the story
  • 1st Person Direct — the protagonist tells their own story
  • 1st Person Central — first person, central to the action
  • 1st Person Peripheral — first person, observing from the sidelines
  • Interior Monologue — stream of consciousness
  • Unreliable Narrator — the narrator's account can't be fully trusted
  • 2nd Person — "you" as the protagonist
  • 3rd Person Limited — close to one character's perspective
  • 3rd Person Omniscient — all-knowing narrator

Scene Planning

Once your setup is complete, you plan the scenes that make up your story.

Auto-plan

  1. Click the Plan button in the toolbar.
  2. The AI generates a scene-by-scene outline based on your premise, characters, structure template, duration, and creative direction.
  3. Each scene gets a title, a brief outline, and a target word count.

To cancel planning mid-stream, click Stop.

Tip: Before planning, Storywright scans your premise for character names. If it finds names that match characters in your library — or new names that don't match anyone — a dialog appears letting you link existing characters or create new ones on the spot. This ensures the AI knows who's in your story before planning begins.

Manual planning

Click the + button to add a scene manually. Fill in:

  • Title — a short scene name
  • Outline — what happens in this scene
  • Word count — target length for generation

Working with scene cards

Each scene appears as a card showing its title, outline (collapsed by default), target word count, and status.

  • Reorder — drag and drop scene cards to rearrange the sequence.
  • Edit inline — click a scene card to edit its title, outline, or word count directly.
  • Full plan view — click the Full Plan button for a full-screen editing view of all scenes.

Refining the plan

  1. Click the Refine Plan button.
  2. A dialog opens where you type freeform feedback — for example, "make the middle act more tense" or "add a scene where the characters discover the hidden room."
  3. The AI revises the plan based on your instructions.
  4. You see a diff of the changes and can accept or reject the revision.

This is one of the most powerful features — it's much easier to fix structure at the plan stage than after generating scenes.

Generating Scenes

Single scene generation

  1. Navigate to the scene you want to generate.
  2. Click Generate.
  3. The AI assembles context into a prompt:
  4. Character cards for characters in the scene
  5. Lorebook entries triggered by keyword matches
  6. Memories recalled by semantic similarity
  7. Continuity state for all tracked entities
  8. Summaries of previous scenes
  9. The scene plan (title, outline, word count target)
  10. Text streams in real-time — you see it appear word by word as the AI writes.
  11. Click Stop at any time to cancel mid-generation.

Post-processing

After a scene finishes generating, four parallel AI calls run automatically:

  1. Summary extraction — a 2–3 sentence summary of the scene, used as context for subsequent scenes.
  2. Memory extraction — topic-tagged facts with vector embeddings, recalled by semantic similarity in future scenes.
  3. Continuity updates — structured entity state changes (location, appearance, possessions, relationships, etc.) added to the continuity ledger.
  4. Thread extraction — identifies narrative threads (ongoing storylines, mysteries, relationships) and discovers new characters mentioned in the scene.

These happen in the background. You can start reading and editing immediately.

Batch generation

To generate all remaining scenes in sequence:

  1. Click Batch Generate (or the equivalent toolbar action).
  2. The app generates scenes one at a time, running post-processing after each.
  3. A progress indicator shows where you are (e.g., "Scene 3/8").
  4. You can cancel between scenes — the app finishes the current scene before stopping.

Batch generation is great for producing a full first draft quickly. Revise individual scenes afterward.

Scene Editor

The right panel is a full-width text editor for the current scene.

  • Previous / Next buttons move between scenes.
  • The current scene title is displayed at the top.

Features

  • Real-time word count — displayed as you type or as text streams in.
  • Edit outline — a button to edit the current scene's plan (title, outline, word count) without leaving the editor.
  • Manual editing — type directly in the editor at any time, just like any text editor.

Note: Manual edits to generated text may clear auto-extracted continuity data for that scene until continuity is re-extracted.

Revising Scenes

AI-powered revision

  1. Type instructions in the revision box below the editor — for example:
  2. "Add more tension to the opening paragraph"
  3. "Rewrite the dialogue between Sarah and Marcus — make it sharper"
  4. "Make this scene shorter, cut the description of the house"
  5. The AI rewrites the scene based on your instructions while preserving context from the rest of the story.

Undo and redo

Full undo/redo support is built in. Every revision — AI or manual — is stored. You can step back through the entire edit history to any previous version.

Manual edits

You can always edit text directly in the editor. Combine AI revisions with manual touch-ups for the best results.

Story Review

After writing several scenes (or a complete draft), you can run an AI-powered review of your entire story.

  1. Click Review in the toolbar.
  2. The AI analyzes your story for:
  3. Plot inconsistencies
  4. Character voice consistency
  5. Pacing issues
  6. Unresolved threads
  7. Continuity problems
  8. Results appear in a dialog showing each finding with an explanation and the scene(s) it applies to.

Story Review runs automatically after batch generation completes. You can also trigger it manually at any time — useful after a round of manual edits or revisions.

Statistics

Click the statistics icon in the toolbar to see story metrics:

  • Total word count and per-scene breakdown
  • Scene count and average scene length
  • Character appearances across scenes

This is a quick way to check pacing and balance without scrolling through every scene.

Prompt Preview

Click the prompt icon in the toolbar to inspect the assembled prompt for the current scene. This shows exactly what will be sent to the AI — system prompt, character cards, lorebook entries, memories, and continuity state. Useful for debugging when generation output isn't what you expected.

Exporting

Open the export menu from the toolbar to save your work:

Format What you get
Export as Markdown Full story with headers, scene titles, and premise
Export as Plain Text Clean text with scene separators
Export Plan as Markdown Scene outlines in structured outline format
Export Plan as Text Plain text outline
Copy to Clipboard Copy the current scene or full story text

Managing Stories

Duplicate

Right-click a story (or use the ⋮ menu) and select Duplicate. This creates a full copy of the story including all scenes, plans, and settings.

Delete

Right-click a story (or use the ⋮ menu) and select Delete. A confirmation dialog appears before the story is permanently removed.

Version History

Save snapshots of your story at any point. You can browse previous versions, restore an earlier snapshot, or delete versions you no longer need.

Tips

  • Write a detailed premise. The more context you provide, the better the AI plans and generates. A one-sentence premise gives mediocre results; a full paragraph gives great ones.
  • Use creative direction to steer tone. This is the best way to shape the AI's output without constraining the plot.
  • Review and edit the plan before generating. Fixing structure at the plan stage is much easier than rewriting generated scenes.
  • Use the Refine Plan feature. Give the AI feedback on the plan and let it iterate — this is faster than manually editing every scene outline.
  • Prefer revision over regeneration. Targeted revision instructions ("add more tension," "rewrite this dialogue") produce better results than regenerating a scene from scratch.
  • Batch generate for first drafts. Generate all scenes at once, then go back and revise individual scenes for quality.
  • Check continuity panels. After generating several scenes, review the continuity state to catch any inconsistencies early.