Writing a novel

This is the workflow for a book made of flowing text: a novel, a memoir, a non-fiction title. If you are making a coloring book, picture book, planner, recipe book, photo book, word search or sudoku book, you want Layout books instead.

The shape of it

1. The premise — title, author, description, genre, and the print format. A few minutes, and everything downstream reads from it.
2. The outline — generated by AI or written by hand. The outline is the spine: it decides what chapters exist.
3. The editor — where the book is actually written, one continuous canvas of chapter sheets.
4. AI enhancement — the accept-or-reject review panel. Nothing is ever overwritten silently.
5. The story codex — the canon the AI is not allowed to contradict.
6. Consistency and research — auditing what you wrote, and grounding it in real sources.
7. Version history and find & replace — restore points, and renaming a character across a whole book.
8. Writing a series — one canon across several volumes, so book three cannot contradict book one.

The idea underneath all of it

Chapters are written separately but must read as one book. So every AI call carries the whole context: the book's premise and genre, the story codex, the entire outline as a numbered arc with the current chapter marked, and a synopsis of everything already written.

That is why the codex is worth filling in and why chapter synopses matter — they are not filing, they are what stops chapter 19 contradicting chapter 3.

Two ways to draft

Chapter by chapter is the recommended path. You write or enhance one chapter at a time, reading as you go, and the book stays coherent because you are the one holding it together.

Auto-draft writes every empty chapter in one background job. It is the fast way to a complete first draft, and it is genuinely useful — but it is a first draft, and it will need the same editing any first draft needs.