Writing Your First Prose

You’ve brainstormed ideas in Snippets, organized your world in the Codex, planned your scenes, and might have chatted with AI to further develop them. But there’s one place we haven’t spent much time yet — the place where your story actually gets written.

In this lesson, we’ll explore the Write interface, learn our way around its layout, and write our first lines of prose.

Entering the Manuscript

There are two ways to get into the Write interface:

The Layout

The manuscript is designed to be clean and distraction-free, but there are a few key areas to know about. Here is a quick tour.

You might notice some familiar elements. The right-hand sidebar shows the POV character you set in our lesson on POV characters and the scene summary you wrote in our lesson on adding scenes. Everything you’ve built so far is right here alongside your writing.

Writing Your First Prose

Let’s write something! Click into the writing area of your first scene. You’ll see a cursor blinking, ready for you to begin.

Try not to overthink it at this stage. Just as we did with the brainstorm snippet we created, the goal is to get words on the page. Now, you are writing your actual story.

Author’s note

For my Cozy Mystery, I’m going to start with one of my first scenes. I have an image in my head of Mia and Sparky in her shop, and I want to capture that moment. So I’ll start with a moment between the two that many dog owners will recognise.

I’m not aiming for perfection here. I just want to set the scene and get a feel for Mia’s voice. I can always come back and revise later.

As you write, you might notice that any character or location names that match your Codex entries will get a thin underline. Click on a mention to see a quick preview of that entry. This is handy for checking a character’s details without leaving your manuscript.

What If I Make a Mistake?

With autosave working in the background, you might wonder: what happens if I accidentally delete a paragraph, or rewrite something and want the old version back?

Novelcrafter keeps a history of your changes. Each scene’s content, summary, and even your Codex descriptions and Snippet content have their own revision history. You can open it to browse earlier versions and restore one if needed.

The history log is a safety net, but it’s good to know it’s there, especially as you start making bigger changes to your scenes.

Using Your Scene Summary as a Guide

One of the benefits of the planning you did in our lesson on adding scenes is that your scene summaries are now visible right beside your writing. You can glance at the scene details panel to remind yourself what this scene is about, then write towards that goal.

Your summary acts as a compass. It points you in the right direction while leaving plenty of room to explore along the way. If your writing takes an unexpected turn, that’s part of the creative process! You can always update the summary later to match what you actually wrote.

Adding New Scenes and Chapters

In a previous lesson, we created scenes and chapters from the Plan interface. But what if you’re in the middle of writing and realize you need a new scene or chapter? You don’t have to leave the manuscript to create one.

At the bottom of each chapter, you’ll see buttons to add new content:

These new scenes and chapters will also appear in the Plan interface, so your outline stays in sync with your manuscript.

Author’s note

I often create new scenes while writing. When I’m in the flow and finish a scene, I’ll click + New Scene and keep going rather than switching to Plan. I’ll tidy up the order later. Don’t let organization slow down your momentum!

Closing Thoughts

You’ve now seen where your story lives in Novelcrafter. In the next lesson, we’ll look at how AI can help you write prose using scene beats.