By the end of this guide, you'll be able to organize a long-form writing project into chapters and use the board to plan your story.
The short version
A Project is a container for a long piece of writing — a novel, memoir, collection, or anything with multiple chapters. Each chapter is its own document with its own writing mode. The project tracks your total word count and progress across all of them.
Open the sidebar and click Projects.
Click New Project.
Give it a title — you can change this any time.
Your new project opens to the Overview tab.
The Overview is your project dashboard. It shows:
Total words
Running word count across all chapters.
Average words per chapter
Helps you gauge chapter length consistency.
Status
Drafting, Revising, or Complete — you set this.
Genre, logline, target word count
Optional fields to keep your project anchored.
Target deadline & writing days
Set a goal and Draftingboard shows your progress toward it.
Chapters
The ordered list of all chapters with word counts and last-edited dates.
Adding chapters
Click + Add chapter at the bottom of the chapter list. A new blank chapter appears, ready to open and write.
You can also import chapters from existing documents — click the ↑ Import button.
Opening a chapter
Click Open → next to any chapter to jump straight into writing it.
Reordering chapters
Drag the ⣿ handle on the left of any chapter row to reorder. The new order saves automatically.
Renaming a chapter
Click the ✎ icon that appears on hover, or click directly on the chapter title.
The Board is a Kanban board for planning your story. It has four columns:
| Column | For |
|---|---|
| Outline | Ideas you haven't started yet |
| Drafting | Scenes or chapters actively being written |
| Revising | Drafts that are done but need editing |
| Done | Finished pieces |
Each card can be typed as a Scene, Chapter, Character, or Idea. Click + Add card at the bottom of any column to create one. Drag cards between columns as your work progresses.
The Plot Grid gives you a structured view of your story across acts and plot lines — useful for planning a novel's shape before you write it, or checking the structure of a draft.
Rows are your plot lines (main plot, subplots, character arcs). Columns are acts or story beats. Fill in the cells to map out what happens where.
Each project has a Drop Zone — a scratchpad that lives inside the project but doesn't count toward chapter order or word count. Use it for research notes, cut scenes you're not ready to delete, or anything you want nearby without including it in the manuscript.
Click Drop Zone in the project overview to open it.
When you're ready to assemble the final document, click Manuscript in the top bar. This combines all your chapters in order into a single document you can review and export.
Manuscript compile is a Pro feature. See the Exporting guide for all export options.
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