The scene editor

Clicking a scene opens the scene editor: a focused, three-panel writing space with a rich-text editor in the middle, your story structure and cast on the left, and notes, goals, and tools on the right. Either side panel can be collapsed with the tab on its edge to give the page over to your prose.

Writing and autosave

Type in the centre surface as you would in any word processor — headings, bold and italic, lists, block quotes, and inline images are all supported. Your work saves itself automatically as you write; there is no Save button to remember. A status indicator and a live word count (both this scene and the whole story) sit in the editor header and update as you go.

Because saving is automatic and version-aware, if the same scene is open on two devices the editor will warn you rather than let one silently overwrite the other.

Highlights

Highlights let you mark a passage and optionally attach a note to it — handy for flagging something to revisit, a continuity check, or a line you love. Select some text, highlight it, and add a note if you want one. Highlights are listed in the right panel and are saved with the scene. There is a limit of around 200 highlights per scene, which is far more than most scenes need.

Redacted (spoiler) text

The formatting toolbar has a redact button (a solid block) that hides a passage behind a black bar, revealed only when a reader clicks or taps it — useful for a spoiler, a hidden answer, or a reveal you want the reader to opt into. Select some text and press the button to redact it; select redacted text and press it again to remove the redaction, the way you would add and remove a link. While you are writing, a redaction you have your cursor inside stays readable so you can edit it — it blacks out again once you move away. The hidden words are always kept in the file; the bar is only how they are displayed.

Redacted text carries through to the beta reading view and the public library reader, where readers click to reveal it, and it is preserved in every export (blacked out in EPUB and Word, and marked as [redacted: …] in plain text and Markdown).

Fonts

You can choose the typeface your story is shown in, at three levels that layer from general to specific:

Story font — the whole story's default, chosen on the story's Edit metadata page. New stories start from your account's editor font.
Scene font — a single scene's default, chosen from the Scene font selector in the left panel of the scene editor. Great for giving a whole point-of-view scene its own look. It overrides the story font for that scene; "Story font" leaves the scene on the story default (the selector names which font that is).
A selected passage — pick a font from the toolbar's font dropdown to set it on just the highlighted text, for a character who speaks in a distinctive typeface, a handwritten note, or a robot's voice. Its "Default" option clears the passage back to the scene or story font (and names the font that is).

The most specific choice wins: a selected passage over its scene, a scene over the story. The editor shows the story exactly as readers will see it. Fonts are limited to those an administrator has installed on the site, so every reader can see them.

These fonts carry through to the beta reading view and the public library reader — where readers can switch to a plain reading font if they prefer — and are embedded in EPUB and Word exports.

Scene notes and chapter notes

The right panel has plain-text boxes for Scene notes (about the scene you are in) and Chapter notes (about its chapter). These are quick jottings — reminders, to-dos, summaries — kept separate from the prose. They save automatically as you type. For richer, longer-form notes and worldbuilding, use the codex.

Version history

Every so often the editor snapshots your scene into its Version history (at most one snapshot every 90 seconds or so of writing, and the most recent snapshots are kept). Open the Version history panel to:

Browse earlier versions and see their word counts and timestamps.
Take a snapshot of the current text on demand.
Restore an earlier version. Restoring is itself just another save, so nothing is lost — you can restore again to step back.

Splitting and merging scenes

Two structural tools live in the Scene menu:

Split at cursor — place your cursor where you want the break, choose Split, and name the new scene. Everything after the cursor moves into a fresh scene inserted right below the current one.
Merge into previous — append this scene to the end of the one before it in the same chapter. It is unavailable on a chapter's first scene, since there is nothing above it.

Splitting and merging only move words that already exist between scenes, so they never inflate or deflate your writing totals.

Searching within the story

Story-wide search finds every occurrence of a word or phrase across all of the story's scenes, listed scene by scene with a few highlighted snippets and match counts, in reading order. From there you can jump to a scene or run a replace across the whole story.

Sprints while you write

You can start a word sprint straight from the right panel — a timed burst of writing with an optional word or minute target. Recent sprints and a Group sprints button sit alongside it, and any writing goals that apply to this story show their progress live as your word count changes.

Editor preferences

The editor remembers how you like to work, per account:

Theme and editor font — set your overall appearance and typeface.
Font size — cycle small, medium, or large from the header.
Save status indicator — the Saved / Saving… / Unsaved changes marker in the header can be shown as coloured or subtle text, or as coloured or subtle cloud icons. Choose the look under Settings; some writers find the subtle or icon styles less distracting.
Panel layout — collapse or expand the left and right panels; the choice is remembered. Each collapsible section (goals, sprint, notes, highlights, history, cast) also remembers whether you left it open.

On narrow screens the side panels overlay the editor and start collapsed so the writing surface stays clear.