DragonWriter

User guide

Everything a writer or reader does in DragonWriter, from creating an account through drafting a story to publishing it and joining the community. The pages are grouped by what you are trying to do; each one is self-contained, and links across to related pages where they connect.

New here? Start with Accounts and settings, then Library and folders to make your first story, and The scene editor to start writing.

Getting set up

  • Accounts and settings — registering, verifying your email, logging in, resetting a password, your settings hub, writing reminders, web-push, and installing the app to your device.
  • Appearance — choosing a theme and reading and editor fonts, and setting your avatar.

Writing

  • Library and folders — your personal library of stories, searching and filtering, organising with folders, and creating a new story (blank or from a template).
  • Stories and structure — building a story out of parts, chapters, and scenes, and moving things around on the structure screen.
  • The scene editor — the writing surface: autosave, live word count, highlights, scene and chapter notes, version history, splitting and merging scenes, and story-wide search.
  • Editor rule sets — per-story auto-corrections as you type: curly quotes, dashes, an ellipsis, and your own word replacements, plus the convert-existing-quotes buttons.
  • Codex: notes, characters, locations — the worldbuilding kept alongside a story: story notes, frontmatter and endmatter, characters, and locations.
  • Readability & Tone — the story overview's craft signals: reading ease, sentence rhythm, dialogue balance, filler words, and pacing.
  • Cast and Places — the whole-story visualisations of your characters, points of view, and locations, built from your per-scene tagging.
  • Covers and images — cover colours and patterns, cover images, and inline images used inside scenes and codex entries.
  • Story templates — starting a new story from a ready-made structure and codex.

Staying motivated

  • Goals and statistics — setting writing goals, tracking streaks, and the statistics dashboard with your word analytics.
  • Sprints — timed writing sprints, solo or as a group.
  • Badges — the word-count and streak ladders, and the special event badges.

Sharing your work

  • Publishing — publishing a story to the public library and the content disclaimer.
  • The public library — browsing the shared library, reading a published story, and downloading it as EPUB, DOCX, TXT, or Markdown.
  • Engagement and notifications — comments and replies, likes, bookmarks, subscriptions, and your notifications inbox.
  • Beta reading — privately sharing a draft with beta readers for inline feedback.
  • Collaboration — real-time co-editing of scenes with other members.
  • Import and export — importing and exporting .dwriter files and exporting finished manuscripts.
  • Recycle bin — restoring or permanently purging deleted stories and parts.

Community

  • Forum — the community discussion boards.
  • Challenges — joining and entering writing challenges.
  • Leaderboards — friendly word-count leaderboards.
  • Profiles — your public member profile and what it shows.
  • Writing tools — the random name generator and story dice.
  • Discord — linking your Discord account and self-assignable roles.
  • Matrix — linking your Matrix account for direct-message notifications.