The Novel Writing Organizer is a workspace for one novel, from the first idea to a finished draft. It keeps the parts of a book that are hard to carry in your head: who everyone is, where things happen, what you have promised the reader and what you meant to fix later.

Your manuscript lives wherever you write it. This holds everything around it.

It is built to be used in seasons. There are no word counts, streaks or daily targets anywhere in it. When you step away for a week or a year, everything stays where you left it, and the door notes tell you where to pick up.

How it is laid out

The home page runs from top to bottom.

• Start here and About Saint Violet at the very top.
• Capture: the inbox, where every loose note goes first.
• The book, the first row of tabs: Ideas, Characters, Plot, World, Research, Notes and the Story Bible. These hold what you know about the novel.
• The draft, the second row: Plan, Scenes, Desk and Resources. These hold the work of writing it.
• Scenes, This round and Where the book stands at the foot of the page: your scenes as cards, the round you are in and a count of where every scene has got to.

Scenes sits at the center. Characters, beats, places, promises, research, notes, Story Bible entries and revision debt all link to scenes, so opening a scene shows everything attached to it.

What is in each tab

• Plan: Novel at a Glance (the whole book on one page), the Outline (the book in a sentence, a paragraph and a page, its beats, and your scenes grouped by chapter), Beats (the shape of the book, with the scenes that carry each beat) and Rounds.
• Scenes: every scene in order, with views for state, landmarks and threads.
• Desk: Revision Debt, Door Notes and the full Inbox.
• Resources: When you're stuck (naming a stall and four short guides), Terms used here (every term the Organizer uses, in a line each), the End-of-round review and the Scene card.

Capturing a note

Anything that comes to you goes in the Inbox first: a line of dialogue, a question to look up, a fact to check, a scene you can suddenly see. Do not stop to file it. Click New in the inbox on the home page, or use the Capture form (see the setup note below) from your phone.

If you already know where it belongs, choose it under Goes to. If you do not, leave it blank or choose Not sure yet.

Sorting the inbox