Guides
Written to make the next chapter easier, not the next purchase. Start with The November Notebook if you're planning a month of writing.
Craft and criteria
The words the trade actually uses, and the questions worth asking of any tool before a hundred thousand words move into it.
- Local Files, Explained for Writers
A "local file" is just a file that sits on the machine in front of you, the same category of object as a photo or a spreadsheet, except this one happens to hold a novel. That…
- Manuscript Export Formats, and What Each One Is Actually For
A finished manuscript has to take a shape someone else expects: an agent, a formatter, an ebook store, a print-on-demand service. None of them expect the same shape, which is why…
- Manuscript vs Working File
A manuscript is the text in the shape someone else expects to receive it: an agent, an editor, a typesetter, formatted to whatever convention that reader works in. A working file…
- Outline vs Structure
An outline is a list: the sequence of events in a novel, set down before the writing starts or reconstructed afterward to see what actually happened on the page. Structure is…
- Revision vs Line Editing vs Proofreading
These three sit on the same shelf and do entirely different jobs. Revision means re-making choices: a subplot gets cut, a character's motive changes, a whole section moves from…
- Sequence and Act, and How They Differ
A sequence is a group of scenes that all move the same value in the same direction, the way a chapter might follow one goal through several attempts before it either succeeds or…
- The Questions to Ask Before You Move a Novel Into a New App
Moving a hundred thousand words rewards a short list of questions asked before the move, not after: a kind of care a photo library never needs. What arrives on the other side can…
- What "Cloud" Means When It's Your Manuscript
Ask three people what "the cloud" means and you'll get three shrugs and one confident wrong answer. For most files, that vagueness costs nothing. For a manuscript, it's worth ten…
- What Is a Beat in a Story
A beat is the smallest working part of a scene: one exchange of behavior, an action followed by a reaction, small enough that a single scene is usually made of several of them…
- What Is a Beat Sheet
A beat sheet is a list of the major turns in a whole book, named and placed at roughly the points where they tend to land: the event that starts things moving, the point where the…
- What Is a Draft in Writing
A draft is a complete state of the text, start to finish, however rough it is in places. The word describes completeness, not quality: a first draft can have thin dialogue, a…
- What Is a Scene in a Novel
A scene is the unit where a value changes for someone. Robert McKee's definition in Story (1997) is the one worth keeping in mind: if nothing shifts between the start of a passage…
- What Is a Story Bible
A story bible is the reference document for what's already been established inside a novel: character names and ages, dates, geography, family relationships, which details have…
- What Is Point of View in a Novel
Point of view is a question about access: who is perceiving the events of the story, and how much can that person see into anyone else's mind. A story told in the first person by…
The writing calendar
What runs in November, what to do in October, and what the year looks like after it.
- How to Write a Novel in a Month, Realistically
Fifty thousand words in thirty days is the number most people mean when they talk about writing a novel in a month, and the math behind it is worth doing once, on purpose, rather…
- Novel Writing Month in 2026, Who's Running It, and When
For close to two decades, one nonprofit organization ran the best-known version of this: write fifty thousand words of a novel in November, together, on a shared clock, with a…
- Preptober, A 30-Day Plan for October That Fits Around a Job
October has become its own small tradition among writers getting ready for November: a month of preparation before the writing itself starts, organized around free workshops that…
- The Writing Year After November
November ends, but the calendar built around it doesn't stop there. What comes next is quieter and more spread out: one small event most weeks, a handful of larger ones tied to…
Read against the grid
Eight public-domain novels read as a writing day: capture, session, structure, revision, output.
- Around the World in Eighty Days, read as five moments
Around the World in Eighty Days ends on an accounting trick: Phileas Fogg is convinced he has lost his own wager, right up until someone checks the calendar. Read against a…
- Frankenstein, read as five moments
Frankenstein opens with a stack of letters: Robert Walton, an Arctic explorer, writing home to his sister about a stranger he's just pulled from the ice. Everything else in the…
- Great Expectations, read as five moments
Great Expectations reached its readers one weekly installment at a time, in the magazine All the Year Round, with a new chapter due whether or not Dickens felt the book was ready.…
- How long is a bestseller? Two studies, two answers
Ask whether bestsellers are getting longer or shorter, and the answer depends entirely on which decade you happen to be counting from.
- Jane Eyre, read as five moments
"Reader, I married him." Jane Eyre's narrator says this near the end of the book, but she's been talking directly to her reader since early in it. Read against a five-moment grid…
- Madame Bovary, read as five moments
Madame Bovary went to trial in 1857, prosecuted for offending public morals, not long after the novel finished its serial run. Read against a five-moment grid for a writing day…
- Pride and Prejudice, read as five moments
Partway through Pride and Prejudice, a single letter from Darcy rewrites everything Elizabeth believed about him, and about Wickham, in one sitting. Read against a five-moment…
- Sentences have been getting shorter for two hundred years, and dialogue is why
Somewhere between Chaucer and Chaucer's modern reader, the English sentence lost most of its length, and one plausible reason for that has less to do with attention spans than…
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, read as five moments
The Picture of Dorian Gray ends with a portrait and a corpse trading places: the picture turns young again, and the man who stayed young for years is found aged and dead beside…
- Wuthering Heights, read as five moments
Wuthering Heights ends exactly where it started: back with Lockwood, the tenant who asked for this story in the first place. Read against a five-moment grid for a writing day…
Templates
Six plain Markdown files. They open in anything, and nothing in them needs Scrin.