Guide — StoryMode

The Dashboard

The dashboard shows all your projects as large cards. Click a project to open it — you can then switch between Folios, Timeline and Map views from the header.

Projects, Folios & Notebooks

Projects are your books, games, or campaigns. Inside each Project, Folios group related notebooks (Characters, Places, Chapters, Lore…). Notebooks are the individual notes.

The Starter Project

New accounts receive a copy of “A Study in Scarlet” pre-populated with folios, timeline events and a world map so you can see every feature in action.

Notebook Theme

Each notebook card in a Folio can be assigned its own theme. Themes change the card's background color, border, and accent tone so you can group related notes at a glance — for example, blue for characters, green for locations, or amber for lore. Open a notebook in the Folio grid and click the theme option to open the picker. The theme preview updates instantly so you can see how the card will look before saving. Pick a color that matches the notebook's purpose, then close the picker to apply it.

Editor Theme

You can also choose the theme for your Story Editor and Focus Mode, tinting the writing surface so that you can start with a blank, white page or a moody dark theme. The chosen theme carries into the Story Editor and Focus Mode, tinting the writing surface so long chapters feel visually tied to the notebook they belong to.

Font & Size

Adjust the editor font size to match your screen and eyesight. Larger sizes work well for long drafting sessions or high-resolution displays, while smaller sizes let you fit more of the chapter on screen when revising structure. Then choose the typeface used for writing: pick a serif for a book-like feel, a clean sans-serif for a modern editor look, or a monospaced face for a screenplay/manuscript feel. Font and size apply across the Story Editor and Focus Mode; the rest of the app keeps its consistent UI typography.

Focus Mode

Open Focus Mode to hide the surrounding UI and write in a calm, full-screen editor. The margins, folios, and tools fade away, leaving just your text and the cursor so you can disappear into the draft.

Writing & Formatting

Use the floating toolbar to bold, italicize, underline, add headings and quotes. The toolbar exposes bold, italic, inline code, headings (H1–H3) and block quotes — every action applies to the current selection or the line the cursor is on. Keyboard shortcuts: Cmd/Ctrl+B for bold, Cmd/Ctrl+I for italic, and Cmd/Ctrl+Z / Shift+Cmd/Ctrl+Z for undo and redo.

Autosave & Draft Status

StoryMode saves your draft every 15 seconds while you type and again whenever you leave the editor. A subtle status indicator shows when a save is in flight and when the draft is safely stored, so you never wonder if your last edit made it.

Scroll Memory

When you leave and return to a chapter, StoryMode restores your exact scroll position — even after switching projects or reloading the browser. Great for picking up mid-paragraph on long chapters.

Undo History & Recovering Edits

The editor keeps a full in-session undo history: use Cmd/Ctrl+Z to step back through recent edits and Shift+Cmd/Ctrl+Z to redo. Because autosave writes continuously, closing the tab and reopening restores the latest saved draft automatically.

Adding & Deleting Chapters

Create a chapter from the Folios browser — it opens straight into edit mode with the 📝 icon already set. Deleting a chapter requires a two-click confirmation within 3 seconds to protect against mistakes.

Review while you write

Select any passage in a chapter and click Mark for Review. The AI Editor works in the background, so you can keep reading, writing, or reviewing other passages while it thinks. Each note costs a few credits, scaled to the length of the passage. When it’s ready, the note appears in the AI Editor sidebar with a critique and one or more rewrite suggestions you can replace with a single click.

What the feedback looks like

The AI Editor flags what feels off and explains why, then gives concrete rewrite suggestions you can compare. A few examples of the kind of notes it leaves: - “This sentence repeats ‘slowly’ and ‘quietly’ — try condensing the action to heighten tension.” - “The dialogue tag is redundant because the line itself conveys the emotion; consider removing it.” - “This description is vivid but interrupts the pacing. Try moving it to a moment when the character has time to notice.” Each note also shows the original passage in context, so you can tap Replace, copy a suggestion, or dismiss the note entirely.

Asking Questions

Type a question in the chat panel. Responses cite the notebook(s) they came from so you can jump straight to the source. Short questions about the chapter you're in cost very little; book-wide questions (plot holes, continuity, arcs) read much more of your story and cost more credits.

Grounding Answers in a Selection

Highlight a passage in a chapter before asking a question and Chat will answer from that specific text, making feedback precise and contextual. Costs a few credits, depending on the length of the passage.

What You Can Ask

Chat works two ways: book-wide when nothing is selected, and grounded on a passage when you highlight text in a chapter first. Use book-wide to reason across your whole manuscript: continuity, character arcs, pacing between chapters.

Ask about a single character's behaviour — "Is Lia's behaviour here consistent with how she acts in previous chapters?" — and Chat weighs it against every earlier scene, then answers with a verdict, moments that ring true, and small wobbles worth smoothing.

Hunt for plot holes, timeline slips, or information gaps across multiple chapters at once. Chat distinguishes real contradictions from deliberate mysteries you're seeding, and points at the exact lines it's reasoning from.

Highlight a paragraph and Chat narrows to just that passage — perfect for a targeted editorial pass on clarity, voice, tone, rhythm, or craft. It comes back with clear sections and concrete rewrite options in the author's voice.

Other things Chat handles well: finding where a location or item was first mentioned, brainstorming alternate scenes, summarizing tangled lore for a synopsis, and comparing events across timelines.

Dates & Ranges

StoryMode accepts almost any date you can write: single dates like 2026-07-23, July 23, 2026, 23 July 2026, or far-future and far-past years like 3025 and 10,000 BC. For ranges, separate two dates with a dash or the word “to”: 3025-01-15 to 3025-06-30, Spring 3025 — Fall 3025, or 1500 BC - 1450 BC. Sci-fi and fantasy timelines are first-class citizens: you can use years like 12027 or -4832. At the project level, the Timeline automatically aggregates events from every folio into a single view — each row is color-coded by the folio it belongs to, so you can see how characters, plotlines and world events line up across your entire story.

Pan & Zoom

Drag horizontally to pan across the ribbon. Scroll (or pinch) to zoom — StoryMode zooms toward the point under your cursor so you can dive from centuries down to a single day without losing your place. Zoom level and scroll position are remembered per folio.

Event Previews

Hover an event to see a floating preview with the full markdown snippet. The popup follows your cursor for extended-range events, and you can pin it open to keep reading while you scroll the timeline.

Pointer (V)

Select and move pills, resize stickers by dragging a corner handle, and press Delete to remove the selection.

Pan (H)

Drag to pan the canvas. Scroll to zoom toward the cursor. Use “View All” to frame every element at once.

Pencil & Color Picker (P)

Paint terrain cells one stroke at a time. The color picker opens beside the pencil with seven hue families and muted/vibrant shade rows, plus a custom HSL gradient and hex input for exact colors. Every color you actually apply is remembered in the recents row at the bottom of the picker — an MRU (most-recently-used) strip that keeps your last dozen colors one click away so you don't have to hunt for them again.

Fill Bucket (F)

Flood-fills an enclosed area. If the shape isn’t enclosed, it sets the map’s global background color instead.

Eyedropper (I)

Click any cell or background to sample its color — StoryMode then switches you back to the pencil so you can keep drawing.

Brush Size

Adjust brush radius from the floating picker. The cursor overlay always shows the exact area you’ll paint.

Label Tool (T)

Place a dashed-border text pill anywhere on the map to annotate regions, borders or landmarks.

Place Notebooks (N)

Pick any folio + notebook from the project and drop it as a pill. Search by title or contents. After placement the tool reverts to pointer.

Delete Tool (X)

Hover a pill to preview a red wiggle warning, then click to confirm removal with a themed explosion.

Undo / Redo

StoryMode keeps a 50-step history of every canvas edit so you can step back and forward through recent changes.

Drawing Stickers on the Map

Pick AI Draw (A), describe what you want (a mossy tower, a market cart, a harbour lighthouse…) and drop the generated sticker anywhere on the map. Resize by dragging a corner handle, rotate with the puck, and press Delete to remove it. Each sticker costs around 16 credits. Styles: choose an illustrated sticker for a hand-painted storybook look, or a pixel sticker for a retro, blocky game-map feel. You can also steer the art direction in your prompt — watercolor, ink line art, flat illustration, woodcut, textured gouache — so every landmark matches the world you're building.

Scanning a Page

Open Scan from any folio, drop your file, and confirm the parsed text. Costs a few credits per scan.

Private Projects

New projects are private by default. Only you can view and edit them. Folios, timelines, maps, and notes are not accessible to anyone else.

Public Read-only Links

Toggle a project to public from the project header to share the story, timeline, and map with anyone. Emails and private notes remain hidden.

Watching Your Balance

Your Profile shows a progress bar for your credit balance. A global banner appears when you’re close to running out.

Buying More Credits

One-click top-ups from the Plans page. Admins can also grant credits directly from the admin dashboard.

Bring Your Own OpenAI Key

Connect your own OpenAI API key in Profile → Integrations to bypass the StoryMode credit quota entirely. When a key is active, the AI Editor, Chat, AI Draw, and Scan all use your key’s balance instead of consuming StoryMode credits, so you never have to think about allowances, top-ups or monthly resets. StoryMode automatically routes your requests to the strongest OpenAI models available on your key: the latest GPT-5 family for chat and review, and gpt-image-1 with high quality for AI Draw and stickers. That means you get the fastest, most capable output without the per-call credit cost. Your key is encrypted at rest and is only decrypted inside StoryMode backend functions — it is never sent to the browser or stored in plain text. You can replace or remove it at any time. Note: AI Map Drawing and AI stickers require an OpenAI key with image-generation access; Anthropic Claude keys are not supported because Claude cannot generate images.

Choosing a Plan

Draft is free forever, Manuscript is $5/mo for regular writers, and Studio is $20/mo for heavy AI users.