Writing and Formatting a Scene

A tour of the toolbar sitting above every scene you write: status, tags, version history, and the formatting tools, all in one row so you never have to leave the page to use them.

1

The toolbar, top to bottom

Every scene opens with two rows above the page. The top row is about the document itself: its title and type, a live word count against your target, its status, tags, and save state, plus Export and Version History on the right. The row below is the formatting toolbar: undo/redo, Bold, Italic, Underline, a Scene break (* * *), indentation, alignment, and font controls, followed by Analyze, Multi-Scene, and a Tools menu for your Project Dictionary and Aliases. Below the toolbar, the scene is laid out as separate pages, the way the Compiler will print it, so you can see when you reach the bottom of a page. Autocorrect, Smart Quotes, spelling language, and page view live in Settings → Writing Tools.

2

Status

Click the status dropdown to mark where a scene stands: Draft, Revision, Review, Final, or Published. The colored dot next to it shows up wherever this scene is listed (in the Manuscript tree, on your project home's recent documents), so you can see your whole draft's status at a glance without opening every chapter.

3

Tags

Click Tags to label a scene by what it's doing structurally: Main Storyline, Subplot, Character Arc, Foreshadowing, and more. Add your own with New tag. Tags are independent of Story Elements: where Story Elements track the facts of a beat, tags track its narrative function, so you can later filter or scan your manuscript for every scene carrying a particular thread.

4

Version History

Alistair keeps restore points as you write: when you open a scene, after each pause in writing, and before anything that replaces your text, like restoring an older version. Click Versions to open the panel: versions are grouped by day, and each says what it changed, quoting the words you added or cut. Click one to read it (older versions open read-only), give one a name like "Sent to my editor", or compare it with your current text. Create Snapshot keeps the text exactly as it is, right before a big rewrite.

The smaller Current dropdown next to Versions is a quick way to jump between recent snapshots without opening the full panel.

5

Export a single scene

Need just this one chapter as a file, say to send to a beta reader without the rest of your manuscript? Click Export for a DOCX or PDF of this document alone. For the whole manuscript compiled together, that's the Compiler (covered next).