écrivain
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 actually write on. It runs in a browser or as a program on your own machine, and nothing you type ever reaches us.
What's inside
There are four screens and a manual, and that is deliberately all there is.
Write is the scene list and the page. Map draws those same scenes woven together so the shape of the book becomes something you can look at. Characters and Reference keep your people and your world a click away instead of in another application. The Manual explains why each part works the way it does, and comes with a separate collection of essays on craft for anyone starting their first long one.
Write
The scene list on the left, the page on the right, and two different kinds of note: planning notes above the prose for what the scene has 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. Setups and payoffs can be drawn as arrows over the top, off by default because a map you cannot read is worse than a list.
Characters and Reference
A profile for everyone in the book and every scene they walk through, then free pages for the rules of the world, its history and the register people speak in.
Write
The page, and the two kinds of note that belong beside it.
Prose in a serif, at a width you set and the app remembers. Above it, planning notes — what this scene has to establish and what it has to withhold, 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 show in the scene's hover preview on the map so you can read your own intentions without opening anything. The scratch pad shows 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 variable the story turns on, whether that is who knows the secret, whose point of view we are in, or how tight the screw is at that moment. Grey is its absence. Turn on the weave and each setup is 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 question scrolling never will: who vanishes for a third of the book. Choose a framework from the dropdown and its expected shape is drawn behind yours, so you can see where Save the Cat thinks your midpoint should be and where yours actually is. When you think it has read a scene wrongly there is a dial on that scene, one to five, and the dial wins outright.
Board
A wall of cards, for the afternoons when the order is wrong.
The same scenes as cards you can drag into place, with a column for the ideas that are not scenes yet. Moving a card moves the scene, because on the board a card's position is the scene's position — the map and the scene list simply follow.
Characters
The people, and the ground they are standing on.
A profile for each person — their role, the facts you keep having to look up, a biography, and every scene they appear in. Then free pages for the world itself: its rules, its history, the language spoken in it. Begin 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 is hidden away in a database, and there is no exporting to be done when you want your work out — it was never anywhere else.
It is saved as plain readable text rather than in a format only écrivain understands, so it will 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 have — and écrivain follows it from one machine to the next. We did not build a syncing service of our own, because yours already works and does not need us standing in the middle of it.
Nothing you write is sent anywhere: not for backup, not for statistics, and not to train anything. If you ask Assist for a second opinion, the key is yours and your words go from your browser straight to whichever company you chose — they do not come past us on the way.
What it will not do
Some things it will not do, on purpose.
Each of these was a decision, and each one cost something to keep.
- Write the book for youAssist will continue a scene, tighten a paragraph or argue with you, using an account you hold with whichever AI company you prefer. It will not put a sentence into your manuscript that you did not write.
- Ask for an account to open your own fileSigning in proves you bought it, once. After that the file opens whether we are still here or not.
- Charge you again every monthA novel takes years, and a subscription does not care whether this was one of the years you managed to write.
- Count your streakThere is a word count, because you asked it for a target. There are no badges, and nothing will ever mention the days you did not write.
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 is built and tested there in the same pass as everywhere else, and ships as a real desktop program — it is one of the two ways you can have it today.
Linux desktop
AppImage, .deb and .rpm, built on Ubuntu 22.04 so the glibc is old enough to run on Fedora, Debian stable, Bazzite and the Steam Deck without an argument.
In the browser
The whole application in a 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 is a separate purchase. A native application is maintenance that carries on for as long as the operating systems keep moving, and one payment made years ago cannot honestly cover both. If you own one and want the other, you pay the difference and nothing beyond it.
The trial is the whole application, for thirty days, and it does not ask for a card.
Prices in pounds sterling. écrivain is made in England by Knapworks Ltd.