A structure engine for novelists

Map the novel.
Write it yourself.

Start from a two-line spark. The Engine proposes the premise, the cast, the subplots and a chapter-by-chapter outline down to the beat, one suggestion at a time. You ink what stays. It never writes a sentence of your prose.

Get early access Watch a book get built

Windows beta · local models or OpenRouter

The Engine's Cast screen: five suggested characters drawn with hatched borders, each with a tick to ink it and a cross to leave it out. — Real screenshot. Five suggested characters wait to be inked or left out.

The workflow

Watch a book
get built.

One story, taken from a spark to a scene's beats. Every image below is a screenshot of the running app, and every suggestion in it was proposed by the model, then inked or left out by a person. Nothing is a mockup.

The Engine 0.1 · qwen2.5:7b running locally on a laptop. Small models propose small ideas; larger ones do better. You stay the editor either way.

StepPitch

Four loglines, four angles.

Give it a spark and a few constraints: genre, tone, point of view, a structure. It pitches loglines from different angles, here goal, obstacle, stakes and irony. Nothing touches your story until you pick one, merge two, or write your own.

The review drawer for a Pitch loglines proposal, showing four hatched logline candidates each labelled with its angle.

Hover or tap the numbersPitch loglines · review drawer

StepPremise

Then it asks like an editor.

Pick a logline and build the premise: the central question, the stakes, the theme. The side panel starts asking what a developmental editor would ask, each with answers you can pick or write over. What you answer feeds everything built after it.

The Premise screen with four candidate loglines, the chosen logline below them, and an editor-style question with two suggested answers in the side panel.

Hover or tap the numbersPremise · candidates, chosen logline, Ask panel

StepCast

Suggestions arrive hatched. You ink what stays.

Characters come with a want, a need and an arc. ✓ inks one, ✕ leaves it out, and either can be undone. Then it maps how the people relate, with a time slider so you can see who they are to each other at the start of the book and at the end.

Stage

Five suggested characters as hatched cards with tick and cross buttons.

The same five cards, with one struck through because it was left out.

The cast inked in, with a relationship map showing alliance, enmity, mentorship and family lines, and a time slider.

Hover or tap the numbersCast · proposed, left out, inked

StepThreads

Every plot, laid against the structure.

The main plot and each subplot become lanes, marked against the beats of the framework you chose: hook, plot points, midpoint, climax. Filled marks are placed in a chapter; hollow marks wait at their target position until you place them.

The Threads screen: four thread lanes, each with marks placed against three-act structure beats from Hook to Resolution.

Hover or tap the numbersThreads · four lanes on a three-act ruler

StepZoom

From the whole book down to one beat.

The outline is built high level first. Then you zoom into any part and develop it: an act into chapters, a chapter into scenes with a goal, a conflict and an outcome, a scene into beats. Every level works the same way: propose, review, ink.

Zoom level

The whole-book view: three acts with word budgets, the framework's beats along the top, and six chapter cards.

An act expanded into six suggested chapters, drawn hatched.

The same act with its chapters inked in.

A single scene with its goal, conflict, outcome and value shift filled in.

A scene's beats on a spine, with four suggested beats drawn hatched on side roads.

The same scene after the suggested beats were inked in.

Hover or tap the numbersBook · three acts, six chapters

StepTrust

Always know the next step, and what the model saw.

Compass shows where the story stands and what to do next. Beside every node, Context lists exactly what is sent to the model, piece by piece, with the token budget. Health tracks what's missing and what's gone stale upstream.

The Compass screen: a recommended next step, and a winding route from Spark to Beats with every stop charted.

Hover or tap the numbersCompass

Context

Every piece of the story the model will read, its size, and how much detail it gets: full, card or summary. A budget bar keeps it inside the model's window.

Health

What this scene still needs, continuity flags, and the version of everything it was built from. Change a premise and what depends on it is marked for review.

Latitude

Give it two words.
Choose how far it wanders.

Most AI tools turn a thin idea into the most average story possible. The Engine lets you set how far it may invent, seeds the early steps with random concrete details to knock it off the obvious, and marks what it made up.

Your spark

“a heist”

Logline · real output, same model, same two words

Your desk, not our cloud

Your unpublished book
never has to leave your computer.

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

Local models

Detects what's installed and suggests the best fit for structure work.

Plain files

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

A model per job

A small local model for quick questions, a bigger one for plotting.

See what's sent

The Context panel shows the exact material behind every request.

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