The Engine Early access →
A structure engine for novelists

Map the novel.
Write it yourself.

Give The Engine a spark and it charts the territory with you: premise, cast, subplots, and an outline you can zoom from the whole book down to a single beat. It never writes a sentence of your prose.

Get early access See how it works

Windows beta · runs on local models or OpenRouter

Spark Premise Cast Threads Acts Chapters Scenes Beats
The survey

The AI proposes.
You decide what's real.

Nothing The Engine suggests touches your story until you say so. Every idea arrives hatched, like unsurveyed ground on an old map. Ink what belongs, leave out what doesn't, and undo anything later.

proposedinked into your story
Proposed character

Brother Oren

The customs clerk who noticed the forged seal. He doesn't want money. He wants his own name off the conscription roll.

Proposed character

Tomas Vell

Mara's younger brother, freed by her lie. He believes he earned his discharge, and he tells everyone so.

Proposed character

The Surveyor-General

Sworn to find whoever forged the border. He taught Mara to draw, and he'd know her hand anywhere.

Three proposals waiting. Try inking one.
The zoom

Scroll inside the map to descend from the whole book to a single beat.

Example project · The Surveyor's Lie

When cartographer Mara Vell forges a border seal to free her brother, she's hired to survey the very frontier her lie created, alongside the man sworn to find the forger.

Act I · The ForgeryThe lie is drawn and cannot be undrawn.
Act II · The SurveyMara maps the false border while it hardens into war.
Act III · The True LineWhat it costs to redraw a country by hand.

Keep scrolling. We're going into Act II.

Act II · 31,000 words · chapters 9–20

The Survey

Mara walks the border she invented with the Surveyor-General beside her, and every stake she drives makes the lie more real. Midpoint: a village wakes up on the wrong side of it.

26 chapters · Act II spans 9–20 · opening chapter 14

Chapter 14 · 3,400 words · POV Mara

The Customs House

Purpose
Put a price on the lie, and make Mara the one who agrees to pay it.
Advances
Main plot · the forgery hunt. Subplot · Oren's conscription.
Closing hook
The page Mara stole shows the border where it really was.
Scene 14.2 · 1,200 words

Oren names his price

Goal
Mara wants Oren's silence about the seal.
Conflict
Oren wants something she can't give without exposing herself.
Outcome
Yes, but: she buys his silence by moving the border a mile east, over his family's farm.
Value shift · safety
hidden
complicit
8 beats · 4 spine, 4 around it
SpineMara arrives after closing and finds Oren waiting with the ledger already open.
SettingRain drives the last clerks in. A wet page smears: ink isn't permanent here.
SpineOren slides the forged seal across the desk and asks her to name it.
AgendaHe isn't after money. His own name is on next month's conscription roll.
SpineMara denies it. Oren points to the flaw: her teacher's mark.
SetupWhen Oren turns, Mara pockets the smeared page.
SpineOren names his price: the border moves a mile east, over his family's farm.
CharacterMara agrees before she has thought it through, and hates how easy it was.
One beat, planned twice

Oren names his price: the border moves a mile east, over his family's farm.

For the writer

Oren has to make it sound routine, or it becomes extortion he could hang for. Mara's dread isn't the price. It's that she'd have offered it.

For the reader

Keep Oren seated and still; let the rain do the moving. The price arrives mid-sentence, about paperwork. Hold on Mara's hands, not her face.

Why it happens, and what reaches the page. The drafting is still yours.

Latitude

Give it two words.
Get a world back.

Most AI tools turn a thin idea into the most average story possible. The Engine lets you choose how far it may wander, fills your silences with details that fit, and marks everything it made up so you know what's conjecture.

Your spark

“a heist”

Fills your silences with specific, fitting detail, and marks what it made up.

Logline · example
Your desk, not our cloud

Your unpublished book
never leaves your computer.

The Engine runs the models already on your machine, through Ollama or LM Studio. Want a bigger model for the hard parts? Route just those jobs to OpenRouter with your own key.

Local models

Finds the models you've installed on its own and suggests the best ones for structure.

Plain files

Every project is a folder of JSON on your disk. No account, no lock-in, easy to back up.

A model per job

A small local model for quick questions, a larger one for plotting. You pick.

Early access

Join the first survey party.

We're opening The Engine to a small group of writers first. Tell us what you write and we'll send your invite when your spot opens.

The Windows beta, as soon as your invite lands
A say in what we build next
Mac and Linux builds as they ship

One email when your invite is ready. No newsletter unless you ask.