Novel mode
Direct a scene in one or two sentences and let the AI write the prose.
A novel is a blank page with a cast. You give one short directive; the AI writes the next beat of prose. Do it again. There is no authored structure to fill in and nothing to fill in it with — a novel is a flat, ordered list of beats, and that's the whole model.
There are no chapters. Novel mode has no chapter model, no act structure and no section breaks. Everything scrolls as one continuous run of beats. If you want chapters, milestones and roles, that's story mode.
Starting one
Your novels live at /app/novels — My Novels, with New Novel to start the wizard. You can also skip the wizard: Start novel on a character's page, Novel on a character card or on one of the character's scenarios, or Write Novel from the home quick actions all create a novel from that character (and, for a scenario, from its title and description as the premise). To adapt an existing conversation instead, see chat to novel.
Characters
Select 1 to 5 characters in one multi-select. The first one you pick is the protagonist — the character the novel is attributed to. The cast cannot be changed after creation.
Story Setup
An optional Title (≤200 characters) and Premise (≤20,000), or let the outline generator draft one from your cast. This step also holds your Persona, the AI Model and the novel's World Books.
Writing style
Pick a preset, describe the voice you want, or paste a sample to extract one — then preview it on your actual cast. You can also write the opening passage yourself, or adopt the preview as the opening. See writing styles.
Begin Adventure creates the novel. If you didn't supply an opening, the play view starts empty with Begin the story — that first tap generates beat one.
Writing a beat
Choose a direction type, type the directive, send. Ctrl/⌘ + 1–4 selects a type directly.
| Button | The beat it produces |
|---|---|
| Do | Your protagonist performs the action, narrated as movement, with one immediate consequence |
| Say | Your line reaches the page as quoted dialogue, then the scene answers once |
| Story | You don't act — the event you name happens; leave it empty and the world moves on its own |
| Describe | A sensory passage on what you named, with no plot movement |
A directive can be up to 8,000 characters, and only Story accepts an empty one. Each generation is capped at roughly a 900-token beat, and a beat that hits the ceiling is trimmed back to its last complete sentence. Length comes from directing more turns, not from asking for more words — see directing prose.
Only one generation runs per novel at a time; a second request while one is in flight is refused. Generation also requires the novel's status to be In Progress.
Revising a beat
Tap a beat to bring up its toolbar: Edit Content, Edit & Regenerate, Regenerate, Delete Segment, plus Illustrate / New illustration / Remove illustration.
Deleting or regenerating a beat also removes every beat after it. This is a cascade, not a splice, and it cannot be undone. Reverie asks first — Remove later beats? tells you how many go with it — but the count is easy to skim past. Edit Content is the one revision that leaves the rest of the novel alone — it rewrites that beat's text in place.
Regenerate, Edit & Regenerate and Delete Segment are offered on the last 8 beats only. An older beat still gets Edit Content and the illustration actions — it just shows Earlier beats are folded into the story memory and can no longer be rewritten or deleted where the other three would be. That matters after a long chat conversion, which can land dozens of beats at once with most of them past the window.
The last beat has two shortcuts of its own: Undo removes it, and Rewrite last beat rolls it again with a Restore previous version option in the toast.
Story memory
Past some length the novel keeps a rolling summary and a raw tail of recent beats rather than the whole text. You can read and edit that summary in Novel Settings → Story Memory (up to 20,000 characters) to fix a detail or pin something the story must not forget. Editing or deleting a beat the summary already covered discards it, and the next generation rebuilds it from what survives.
Status, covers and sharing
| Setting | Where | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Novel Settings | In Progress, Completed or Abandoned. The last two show a banner with Resume writing; you cannot generate until you resume. |
| Cover | Novel Settings | Generated from the title, premise and cast, with an optional description. Costs credits. |
| Visibility | Novel Settings → Sharing | Private, Unlisted (link only) or Public. Needs at least one passage written. |
| Reading settings | Play view | Font size, serif or sans, and Show directives off for a prose-only read. |
A public novel gets a reader page, appears in the public novel feed and is listed under Novels on its protagonist's character page. Anyone reading a public novel can start from it — that copies it, optionally up to a chosen beat, into a new novel of their own. Novels do not branch, and that copy is the only thing resembling a fork.
Export
Export offers two formats, for the owner, on a novel with at least one beat:
- Markdown — plain prose with the title, byline, cover, premise and inline illustration links.
- HTML — a self-contained illustrated page with its own styling, light and dark, and print rules for saving to PDF.
There is no EPUB, DOCX or direct PDF export.
Models and credits
The model is chosen per novel and can be switched mid-novel; each beat records the model that wrote it. Unlike story mode, the novel picker is not restricted to tool-capable models. Credits are the tokens used times the model's multiplier, which is shown next to each model in the picker; illustrations and covers are charged separately. The free model has a per-user rate limit shared with chat and stories. Subscribing does not put novel generation in a faster queue — no such queue exists.
Related
- Directing prose — the four direction types in depth
- Writing styles — the wizard's third step
- Chat to novel — start from a conversation
- World Books — lore attached to a novel
- Introducing novel mode — design notes