The Writing Assistant

Overview

The Writing Assistant is a chat panel built into the writer. It's a creative partner you can talk to — brainstorm plot, ask craft questions, develop characters, and turn ideas into Story Bible entries or prose without leaving your draft. It understands your project's context, so its suggestions fit the story you're actually writing.

Opening the Assistant

The Assistant lives in the right panel of the writer. On desktop you can hide it or bring it back with the panel button at the top of its edge, and drag the edge between it and your draft to make it wider or narrower; on mobile it opens as a bottom sheet. The panel has three tabs:

• Chat — the conversation surface (the default).
• History — your past conversations: open, rename, duplicate, export or delete them.
• Activity — a read-only timeline of what changed in your project.

Type in the composer at the bottom, press Enter to send, or Shift+Enter for a new line.

Asking & Brainstorming

At its simplest, the Assistant is someone to think out loud with. Ask it anything about your story or about craft:

• “What's a stronger motivation for my antagonist?”
• “Help me untangle the timeline in act two.”
• “How do I make this reveal land harder?”

It answers conversationally and pulls from your project context where that helps. Plain conversation like this is inexpensive — you're only spending meaningful Genesis Tokens when you ask it to generate something substantial.

Story Bible Proposal Cards

Ask the Assistant to invent something concrete and it returns a proposal card right in the chat:

• “Make me a rival captain with a grudge.” → a Character card
• “Design a rain-soaked harbor city.” → a Location card
• “Invent a blood-magic system with a cost.” → a Worldbuilding card

Review the card, then insert it into your Story Bible as a new Character, Location, or Worldbuilding node with one click. If you want options, you can insert more than one variation from the same idea. Nothing is added to your project until you choose to insert it.

Writing & Continuing Prose

The Assistant is also where prose gets written — there are no Write or Continue buttons elsewhere in the writer. Ask “write the scene where they finally meet” or “continue this chapter” and it writes from your draft, your recent conversation and your story context. The prose arrives as a card in the chat; choose Insert into draft to add it to the end of your draft (or fill an empty one). See Writing and Continuing with Chat.

Attaching Files

Need the Assistant to work from existing material? Use the + button in the composer to attach up to three files (.txt, .md, or .docx). It reads them as reference for that conversation — handy for an outline, a style sample, or notes you drafted elsewhere. Very long files are trimmed to keep the conversation responsive.

Chat and Full Access

The switch beside the composer's + picks how much the Assistant may do:

• Chat (default) — ask, brainstorm and talk your story through. When you want something made or changed (a scene written, a character created, a chapter tightened), just ask: it arrives as a card in the chat. Nothing changes in your project until you apply it, and every applied change can be undone from its card.
• Full access — the Assistant makes the changes itself, up to five a turn, and lists them under Changes in the chat, each with its own Undo. You turn it on per project, and can turn it off whenever you like.

In Full access nothing waits for you to approve. If the text it meant to change was edited in the meantime, the Assistant finds it again and makes the change there. When it can't make a change (it has already made five this turn, the text is gone, or you pressed Stop), its reply says so and nothing is changed; ask again or ask it to carry on. Anything extra it notices, such as a new character who isn't in your Story Bible yet, it mentions in its reply instead of adding it. Say yes and it adds it.

Tips

• Be specific. “A mentor who secretly resents the hero” gives a sharper card than “a mentor.”
• Iterate in the chat. Don't love a proposal? Ask for a darker, older, or more reluctant version before inserting.
• Keep the Story Bible fed. Cards you insert become context the AI uses everywhere else it writes — see Context Building & Story Bible.