Planning and writing chapters

Once enough of your story has been gathered, the Book tab turns it into a manuscript. You plan an outline first, review and reorder it, and only then ask the app to write the prose.

The Book tab shows your cover, the chapter list, and a Plan & write menu with the two big actions: Plan chapters from your story and Write all chapters. There's also Add chapter for adding one by hand, and a settings button.

Before there's enough to plan

A young book shows: "Your book is still taking shape — there isn't enough of your story yet to plan the chapters," with buttons back to Keep telling your story and Add material. This isn't a fault. Keep going with the interview or add some material.

Once enough moments have been gathered, the tab changes to "Ready to shape your book" and offers Plan chapters and Add a chapter manually.

Plan the chapters

1. Tap Plan chapters from your story.
2. Choose a structure: Hybrid (recommended), Chronological or Thematic.
3. Tap Plan chapters.

The app reads every moment in your story and groups them into a chapter outline. This is an outline only. No prose is written yet, so you can rename, reorder (drag), add or delete chapters before anything is written.

Chapters you asked for in conversation, and any chapters already written or locked, are kept. Planning again only replaces empty outline chapters.

When outlined chapters exist, a banner appears: "Outline ready — review and edit the chapters, then generate the prose," with a Generate all button.

Write the chapters

Write one chapter with the Write button on its card, or everything at once with Write all chapters, which writes every outlined chapter that isn't locked or already written.

Each card shows its state:

• Outline: planned but not yet written.
• Writing…: being written now.
• Generated: prose is ready to read and edit.
• New material · regenerate: new recordings or uploads landed in this chapter's territory since it was written. Rewrite refreshes it. Locked passages are kept.
• No material: the chapter has nothing to draw on yet.
• Failed: writing hit an error. Retry from the chapter editor.

Each card also offers Write / Rewrite, Lock chapter / Unlock chapter, and Delete. Rewriting warns you that it replaces the current text (locked passages excepted). Deleting asks you to confirm.

If writing seems to have stopped, see Chapter generation seems stuck.

Locking a chapter

Locking freezes a chapter completely. It can't be edited, and neither planning again nor Write all chapters will touch it. The planner literally plans around locked chapters.

Lock a chapter the moment you think "this is exactly how I want it." To protect a single passage rather than the whole chapter, see Editing a chapter.

Title, summary and cover

The cover panel on the Book tab offers Edit title & summary and Edit cover. See Designing your cover.