Quick Start - Pantsers

This article is for those who prefer to write in a “pantsing” or discovery style, i.e. you do not plot in advance. Whether you start from sentence one and write until you’ve finished, or write out of order and stitch the book together, you can do both with novelcrafter.

Whilst there will be written instructions included, think of this as a one-stop-hub for documentation. A contents page that you can flick through to find the documentation that you may need.

Please ensure you have followed the connecting to the AI instructions first, if you wish to use AI with your novel.

Step 1. Create a new book

To create a novel from scratch, click + Create Novel . You can always put placeholder information for the meta data at this point, if you have not decided on a title or pen name.

Step 2. Fill in your Codex

If you have any details you know about the story (characters, places, lore), you can add these into the codex. These don’t have to be detailed, but can help you refine your novel. It can be as simple as adding in the genre or premise to your story.

Step 3. Begin Writing

Go to the write interface and select + Add Initial Scene .

You can subsequently add in any synopses or notes you have, or begin to write. If you are not using AI assistance, you do not need to do anything else.

If you wish to use AI assistance, you can access these features by typing a forwards slash / and select the  Scene Beat Completion  option. Type in your initial idea for the opening of your book, and click the downward arrow to Tweak and Generate your prompt. To learn more about text generation, see our manuscript documentation.

Step 4. Repeat

If you have an idea for where you want your story to go next, follow the same process as above. If however you want to continue the story and have no concrete instructions, type a forwards slash / and select the  Continue the Story  option. This will pre-populate the scene beat completion box with the text.

And that’s it! As you go on, you can add characters to your codex, rearrange your plan, add more chapters. But all you really need to begin is the write interface, and your idea.

Happy Writing!

Bonus Tips

Scene Summarization

After finishing every scene, you can click on the scene action menu to the right of the write interface, and use AI to summarize the scene. This will help you keep track of your story (for those who don’t use AI when generating prose). For those who write with AI, this will be even more important as it will remind the AI of what has happened in past scenes to aid in continuity.

Building your Codex

Once you have started writing, then you will need to fill your codex, the ultimate repository of all things related to your novel. There are two easy ways to quickly add entries to the codex using AI.

1. Detect Characters/Locations

   In the scene action menu select Detect Characters .

   

   

   Any characters or locations etc already in your Codex are automatically detected, to avoid duplicates. You can choose to create a new entry, or select the entry manually to merge. If you don’t want to use one of the options, then delete it.

2. Chat and Extract

   With cheap models such as Gemini Flash Lite, Sonnet Haiku 3, etc, you can also use the context feature in chat to extract names, locations, lore, etc. This is great if you’ve already written a huge chunk of your story.

   1. Open up a new chat. In the context, add the chapter/s that you wish to extract data from.

   2. Type into the chat window something like:

      Example

      Please give me a list of all the characters in this scene. Please also include any physical details or personality traits that you infer from reading this scene. Format in the following way:

      Name: Details

      

   3. Use the answers provided to extract the information you need.

      

   4. You can choose to accept or decline the proposed codex entries, or edit them yourself.