What is Writingale?

Writingale is a Mac app for writing books — and for keeping track of everything around the writing: characters, places, timelines, relationships, research notes, and how it all connects.

Your book stays yours

A Writingale book is a folder of plain text files on your Mac — one file per chapter, one per character, one per note:

MyBook/
  Chapters/the-room-and-the-plate.md
  Characters/vashti.md
  Locations/the-air-ship.md
  Items/the-book-of-the-machine.md
  Notes/why-the-machine-stops.md

There is no account, no sync service, and no locked format. That buys you things a closed writing app can't:

• No lock-in. Every file opens in any text editor, today and in thirty years. If Writingale disappeared tomorrow, your book wouldn't.
• Back up and share your way. Keep the folder in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or wherever you already keep files. It behaves like any other folder because it is one.
• Other tools welcome. Edit a file in another app while the book is open — Writingale notices and picks up the change.

Links that never break

Anything in your book can mention anything else — a chapter names its cast, a note comments on a scene, an item belongs to a character. In Writingale these mentions are links, and links point at the thing, not at its current name. Rename a character in chapter thirty and every mention of her across the whole book follows instantly. Nothing to find-and-replace, nothing to break.

The book that reads itself back to you

Because chapters carry a little structure — who's in the scene, where it happens, when — Writingale can work backwards and answer questions about your own story:

• Each character's journey — where they appear, when, with whom — is worked out from the chapters themselves, never maintained by hand.
• The graph draws the whole web of your story: who connects to what, and where.
• The timeline lays events out in story time, including things that happened before page one.

The more you fill in, the more the book can tell you. Fill in nothing, and Writingale is still a fine place to just write.

Made to fit your book

Chapters, characters, locations, items, and notes are only the starting set. A fantasy epic might add factions and artifacts; a mystery, clues and suspects; a memoir, people and years. You define your own kinds of things — each with its own icon, color, and fields — and the whole app reshapes itself around them. See Entity Types & Traits.

The example book

Writingale comes with an example project, The Machine Stops — an abridged retelling of E. M. Forster's 1909 story of a buried, machine-fed humanity and the one man who climbs back to the surface. It uses every feature: parts and chapters, a custom Faction type, writing goals, a story timeline with events before the book opens, notes pinned to passages, character relationships, images, and a cut scene kept as aside material. Open it from the welcome screen; most screenshots in this documentation show it.

Next steps

• Install Writingale
• Create your first book
• Understand books and entities