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Story Engine

The Story Engine is an interactive planning workspace for novel projects. It takes you from a genre and a premise all the way to chapter-by-chapter drafts, while keeping you in control of every detail.

The Story Engine is available in Novel projects. You can open it from the Assistant panel, or via Brainstorm → Story Engine.

The workspace​

The Story Engine is organized into three columns:

  • Story Plan (left) — the genre, genre details, synopsis, plot structure, project traits, knowledge base entities (with names, summaries, and traits), and story direction entries. Every field is editable and can be individually locked.
  • Chapter Plan (center) — a chapter-by-chapter outline. Each chapter has a title, a summary, and optional story beats. Chapters can be reordered via drag-and-drop.
  • Chapter Draft (right) — a read-only prose preview of the selected chapter. From here you can also generate a chapter illustration and select the writing style used for drafts.

Generating a story plan​

The story plan is generated in stages: the genre details and synopsis come first, since they shape everything else, followed by the project traits, story direction, and knowledge base entities.

The plot structure you choose determines how the chapter outline is built. Available structures include Three-Act, Hero's Journey, Save the Cat, Fichtean Curve, Kishotenketsu, and several others.

When generating the chapter plan, the AI picks a chapter count that fits the complexity of your story (between 10 and 25), then writes the chapters one at a time, keeping the outline consistent from start to finish.

You can stop a multi-step generation at any time — the current step finishes, and nothing new starts after it.

Locking and iterating​

Any field can be locked to preserve it during regeneration. Locked fields are skipped entirely — the AI generates around them. Content that already existed in your project (loaded from the knowledge base, project details, or project outline) is locked by default when you open the Story Engine, so the AI never overwrites your work uninvited.

The Reimagine button lets you provide a natural-language direction — for example, "make the tone darker" — that guides the regeneration of all unlocked fields.

Chapter drafts​

Drafts are written with your full story plan and the surrounding chapters in mind, so each chapter picks up where the previous one left off. You can pick the writing style used for the prose: Default, Personal, or any of your custom writing styles (Pro only).

You can also generate an illustration for each chapter using AI image generation.

Saving your work​

Chapter drafts aren't added to your project until you save them. The "Save chapter drafts" button creates a sheet for each chapter (or updates the chapter's linked sheet, if it already has one), with the illustration placed at the top.

If your project already has a project outline with linked sheets, the Story Engine loads the sheet content into the draft column when it opens, and a reset button in the toolbar lets you revert a draft back to the sheet version.

Credit costs​

Each generated text field — a trait, a synopsis, a chapter, a draft — costs 1 AI credit. Chapter illustrations cost 10 credits each.