Writing

Chapter Cards

The Chapter Card is where you write. It's a focused, distraction-free editor built around everything a novelist actually needs — formatting, AI feedback, chapter context, and a way to keep your text and your notes in the same place.

A Chapter Card open in Auctor showing the text editor with the AI assistant panel — The Chapter Card — rich-text editor, AI assistant, and chapter context all in one view.

The editor

Three tabs, one chapter

Text

The main writing surface. A clean rich-text editor supports bold, italic, and two levels of heading. A status bar at the bottom shows your current line, column, and running word count.

The toolbar also includes:

Find & Replace — search the chapter text or replace across it, accessible from the Edit menu or by keyboard shortcut
Paragraph ratings — after running an AI critique, a palette button appears in the toolbar. Toggle it to colour-code your paragraphs from red (needs work) to green (strong) based on the ratings the AI assigned. It's the fastest way to spot the weak sections of a chapter at a glance
Split view — a split-pane button lets you read your AI critique alongside your text without switching tabs, so you can revise and reference feedback at the same time

Settings

Per-chapter context that the AI reads before it offers any feedback or rewrites:

Age Offset — a number of years to shift all character ages for this chapter. Set it to -10 for a flashback and the AI will adjust how it interprets your characters' ages accordingly
Chapter Summary — a brief note on what happens in this chapter. Helps the AI understand where in the story it is and what the scene is trying to achieve
Writing Style — instructions about the tense, point of view, narrative voice, or mood of this chapter. The AI will use this when rewriting or extending your prose
Subplots — tag which of your project's subplots are active in this chapter. The AI uses these tags to check whether the chapter is serving those threads

Critique

The stored AI critique for this chapter. Every time you run a critique from the AI chat panel the result is saved here, so you can return to it later. The same content appears in the split view if you prefer to have it beside your text while you write.

Selection tools

Refine any passage

Right-click any selected passage to open the Refine dialog. This gives you a dedicated workspace for improving a specific piece of prose without touching the rest of the chapter. You can rewrite it, make it shorter, or make it longer — and you can iterate, providing your own notes and asking for a re-critique of the refined version, until you're happy.

Accepting replaces the original selection in the chapter; rejecting closes the dialog and leaves the text unchanged.

Getting started

How to use it

1
Create a new chapter from the Explorer panel (under Chapters).
2
Write in the Text tab. Save with the Save button or Ctrl+S.
3
Open Settings and fill in the summary, style notes, and any active subplots — even a sentence or two per field gives the AI useful context.
4
Run a Critique from the AI assistant panel. The feedback lands in the Critique tab and the paragraph ratings appear in the toolbar.
5
Use the palette button to colour your paragraphs and see at a glance which ones the AI rated low, then use the Refine dialog to work on specific passages.

All features