A story is something you only understand by writing it.
écrivain is the room you do that in. One file on your own drive holds the map of your scenes, the people in them, the world they move through, and the page you write on. It runs in a browser or as a program on your machine, and nothing you type ever comes near us.
What's inside
There are four screens and a manual, and that's deliberately all there is.
Write is the scene list and the page. Map draws those same scenes woven together so you can look at the shape of the book. Characters and Reference keep your people and your world a click away instead of in some other app. And the Manual explains why each part works the way it does — plus a separate set of essays on craft, if this is your first long one.
Write
The scene list on the left, the page on the right, and two kinds of note: planning notes above the prose for what the scene's got to do, and a scratch pad beside it for the line you want to try later.
Map
Every scene woven into one picture, coloured by the single thing your story turns on. You can draw the setups and payoffs over the top as arrows — that's off by default, because a map you can't read is worse than a list.
Characters and Reference
A page for everyone in the book and every scene they walk through, then free pages for the rules of the world, its history, and how people talk in it.
Write
The page, and the two kinds of note that belong beside it.
Prose in a serif, at a width you set and it remembers. Above it, planning notes — what this scene's got to establish and what it's got to hold back, written to yourself rather than to a reader. Beside it, a scratch pad for the loose things: a line to try later, a name to check. The notes turn up in the scene's hover preview on the map, so you can read your own intentions without opening anything. The scratch pad shows up nowhere and goes into no export.
Map
The shape of the book, as something you can actually look at.
Every scene woven into one map, each coloured by its thread — the one thing the story turns on, whether that's who knows the secret, whose head we're in, or how tight the screw is at that moment. Grey means it's absent. Turn on the weave and every setup gets drawn to the scene where it lands.
Shape
Pacing you can argue with, and a framework to hold it against.
The book laid out along its own length, so a four-thousand-word chapter takes four times the room of a thousand-word one. The curve is where the weight falls: the load-bearing scenes, and the setups coming home — one planted twenty chapters back counts for more than one planted in the scene before. Underneath runs a lane per character, which answers the thing scrolling never will: who disappears for a third of the book. Pick a framework from the dropdown and its expected shape gets drawn behind yours, so you can see where Save the Cat thinks your midpoint should be and where yours actually is. If you reckon it's read a scene wrong, there's a dial on that scene, one to five, and the dial wins.
Board
A wall of cards, for the afternoons when the order's wrong.
The same scenes as cards you can drag about, with a column for the ideas that aren't scenes yet. Move a card and you've moved the scene — on the board a card's position is the scene's position, so the map and the scene list just follow.
Characters
The people, and the ground they're standing on.
A page for each person — their role, the facts you keep having to look up, a biography, and every scene they're in. Then free pages for the world itself: its rules, its history, the way people talk in it. Start a line with a hash and it becomes a heading; the pages are yours to name, reorder or throw away.
Where your book lives
Your whole book is one file, and it sits on your own computer.
You can see it, rename it, copy it onto a memory stick, drop it in whatever folder you already back up, or email it to yourself. Nothing's hidden away in a database, and there's no exporting to do when you want your work out — it was never anywhere else.
It's saved as plain readable text rather than some format only écrivain understands, so it'll still open in forty years when the rest of us have gone.
Keep that folder in a cloud drive you already pay for — iCloud, Dropbox, whichever you've got — and écrivain follows it from one machine to the next. We didn't build our own syncing, because yours already works and doesn't need us standing in the middle of it.
Nothing you write gets sent anywhere: not for backup, not for statistics, and not to train anything. If you ask Assist for a second opinion, the account's yours and your words go from your browser straight to whichever company you picked — they don't come past us on the way.
What it won't do
Some things it won't do, on purpose.
Every one of these was a decision, and each one cost something to keep.
- Write the book for youAssist will carry on a scene, tighten a paragraph or argue with you, using an account you hold with whichever AI company you prefer. It won't put a sentence in your manuscript that you didn't write.
- Ask for an account to open your own fileSigning in proves you bought it, once. After that the file opens whether we're still here or not.
- Charge you again every monthA novel takes years, and a subscription doesn't care whether this was one of the years you managed to write.
- Count your streakThere's a word count, because you asked it for a target. There are no badges, and nothing will ever mention the days you didn't write.
The way in
Sign in, or open the demo.
One account, however you like to make one. We keep your email address and which platform you bought — nothing else.
Where it runs
Linux is a first-class target here, not a promise for later.
Most writing software treats Linux as a web page and a shrug. écrivain's built and tested there in the same pass as everywhere else, and ships as a real desktop program — it's one of the two ways you can have it today.
Linux desktop
AppImage, .deb and .rpm, built on Ubuntu 22.04 so the glibc's old enough to run on Fedora, Debian stable, Bazzite and the Steam Deck without an argument.
In the browser
The whole thing in a browser tab, on any machine you can borrow. The file still lives on that machine's own drive.
macOS and Windows
The same single file in a native window, opening and saving against your own folders rather than the browser's idea of them.
iPad and tablets
For the drafting that happens in a chair rather than at a desk.
What it costs
Bought once, the way a book is.
£39 once, for the browser version
The desktop build's a separate purchase. A native app is maintenance that carries on for as long as the operating systems keep moving, and one payment made years ago can't honestly cover both. If you own one and want the other, you pay the difference and nothing beyond it.
The trial's the whole thing, for thirty days, and it doesn't ask for a card.
Prices in pounds sterling. écrivain is made in England by Knapworks Ltd.