How to Organize a Writing Project from Premise to Revision

Let the idea wait somewhere real

Not every premise deserves a project yet. Ideas are held on their own, with room for the premise and the reason it interests you, and converted into a project only when they are ready. Nothing is lost while an idea matures.

Plan with pages built for the form

When you start a project you choose Fiction, Nonfiction or Scholarly, and the planning pages follow: premise and structure for a novel, argument and audience for long-form nonfiction, research question and method for a paper or thesis.

Draft in a real section hierarchy

Parts, chapters and scenes exist as actual sections with their own status and live word counts, so you can see where the manuscript is thin instead of scrolling one long file to find out.

• —Give every section a status so an unfinished chapter is visible at a glance.
• —Watch the section word counts, not only the total, when the middle sags.
• —Reorder sections as the structure changes rather than rewriting around it.

Keep the cast and the sources attached

Characters or interviewees live in a register with their traits, arc and relationships. Sources and quotations attach to the exact section that uses them, which is what makes a citation pass finite.

If a passage you saved while reading in the Review workspace belongs in your own draft, carry it across as a source so the lineage stays visible.

Revise in named passes, then export

Revision works better as a plan than a mood. Named passes with prioritised flags let you fix one class of problem at a time — structure, then argument, then line-level — and see what is left.

Goals and sessions record what you actually wrote rather than what you meant to. When the draft is ready, export the whole manuscript as Markdown or plain text.