Workflows

Writing a Novel with Inklings

A novel is not a document. It’s a system. Characters make promises in chapter three that have to be paid off in chapter twenty. A subplot introduced in Part One has to rhyme with the climax of Part Three. The timeline of a multi-POV story is a scheduling problem where the currency is narrative tension rather than calendar time.

This guide is for writers who have tried to manage a novel in a notes app and run out of patience with it. Inklings isn’t a word processor — it’s the scaffolding behind your prose, the place where you track what’s happening so the writing itself can stay free.

To illustrate, we’ll use a work in progress: The Unfortunate Destiny of Barnaby the Unremarkable, a fantasy novel about a thoroughly average man who has been informed he must save the realm and would very much like a refund.

Create Your Novel’s Workspace

One workspace, one project. Give it a working title, a code name, or just “The Novel” — the workspace name doesn’t have to match your eventual title, and you can change it at any time.

Inside this workspace lives everything about the manuscript except the prose itself: structure, character files, world notes, research, thematic tracking, revision notes. If you’re writing a series, you might use a separate workspace per book, or organize multiple books within one workspace under top-level folder pages. Either approach works; this guide assumes a single-book project.

Structure the Manuscript

Inklings uses a page tree that mirrors how books are actually organized. Nest your manuscript structure:

The Unfortunate Destiny of Barnaby the Unremarkable
├── Part One: The Reluctant Prophecy
│   ├── Chapter 1 — An Unremarkable Morning
│   ├── Chapter 2 — Gandrick Arrives (Uninvited)
│   └── Chapter 3 — The Prophecy (First Draft)
├── Part Two: The Inconvenient Quest
│   ├── Chapter 4 — Departure (Under Protest)
│   └── Chapter 5 — Lord Dreadmore's Aesthetic Choices
├── Characters
│   ├── Barnaby the Unremarkable
│   ├── Gandrick the Mostly Wise
│   ├── Queen Thornmere the Unimpressed
│   ├── Lord Dreadmore
│   └── Pip the Sidekick
├── Locations
│   ├── Mudbrook (unremarkable village)
│   ├── The Spire of Foreboding
│   └── Castle Dreadmore (tastefully gothic)
└── Themes and Motifs

Create chapter pages as children of their part by right-clicking a Part page in the sidebar and selecting New Subpage. Keep your actual prose in your drafting tool; use Inklings chapter pages as production notes — the scene list, POV character, what must be established, what must pay off, what loose threads are introduced.

Go as granular as your process demands. Some writers keep one page per scene with a full beat sheet; others keep one page per chapter with a summary paragraph. Find the level that lets you hold the whole book in your head without actually having to hold it in your head.

Type Your Story’s Entities

A multi-character novel has characters. Characters have arcs. Create a Character type in Settings → Types with properties that matter for your story:

arc-phase (select: Setup, Complication, Dark Night, Transformation, Resolution)
role (select: Protagonist, Antagonist, Supporting, Ensemble)
status (select: Active, Offstage, Deceased, Alive Probably)
allegiance (text)

Assign the Character type to each character page. Open Barnaby’s page, click the type badge in the detail panel, and assign Character. His arc-phase is Denial — a custom option you’ll want to add to the dropdown, and where he’ll remain for most of the book.

Gandrick the Mostly Wise gets arc-phase Setup, status Alive, Probably, and a role of Supporting. He’s been in Setup since page twelve. He will remain in Setup. This is simply who he is.

Lord Dreadmore: role Antagonist, allegiance Evil, Obviously, arc-phase Resolution — he peaked at the mid-point reveal and has been coasting on the aesthetic since.

Create a Location type if setting matters to your plot. Mudbrook gets atmosphere Unremarkable. Castle Dreadmore gets atmosphere Tastefully Gothic and a foreboding-index of 9 out of 10 (the gargoyles are load-bearing). Properties don’t have to be complete to be useful. A status property with a few options costs almost nothing to maintain and tells you at a glance which characters are still in play — or at least probably still in play.

Tag Scenes and Subplots

Every scene serves multiple masters. It advances the main plot, a subplot, or a character arc — sometimes all three. Tags let you track which master each chapter serves without restructuring your hierarchy.

Add tags to chapter pages from the tag bar at the bottom of the editor:

Subplot tags: subplot-prophecy-loophole, subplot-gandrick-memory-loss, subplot-pip-real-hero
POV tags: pov-barnaby, pov-pip
Thematic tags: theme-destiny-is-annoying, theme-competence-is-relative, theme-heroism-by-accident
Status tags: draft, revised, final

With these tags in place, the sidebar filter becomes a story map. Filtering by subplot-gandrick-memory-loss shows every chapter where Gandrick has forgotten something he absolutely should have remembered. Filtering by pov-pip shows Pip’s chapters in isolation — useful when you realize Pip has quietly solved three separate crises while Barnaby was reconsidering the whole destiny situation. The AND/OR filter mode matters here: filtering by pov-barnaby AND subplot-prophecy-loophole shows only chapters where Barnaby is actively trying to find a contractual exit from his chosen-one status.

Connect Characters to Their Story Moments

Wiki-links are the connective tissue between your structural pages. In Barnaby’s character page, link to every chapter where he appears: type [[ and select [[Chapter 3 — The Prophecy (First Draft)]], [[Chapter 4 — Departure (Under Protest)]], [[Chapter 7]]. In each chapter page, link to the characters who appear and the locations where the scene is set.

The payoff runs in both directions. Barnaby’s page shows you all chapters that link to him — his complete story in the book, at a glance. Each chapter’s backlinks panel shows which character files reference it.

Link characters to each other when their relationship is worth tracking. [[Gandrick the Mostly Wise]] links to [[The Prophecy (First Draft)]] — and the backlinks panel will reveal that he has described the prophecy differently in every chapter it’s mentioned. This is either a continuity error or the plot. Decide before your editor does.

Pip the Sidekick links to every chapter where a problem gets quietly resolved without Barnaby noticing. The Spire of Foreboding links to every scene set there, so when you need to know whether Barnaby has been to the Spire before the confrontation in Part Three, you don’t have to search your memory — you search the backlinks.

This isn’t busywork. It’s building the connective tissue that will save you from continuity errors in revision — the moment when you’re in Chapter 18 and need to know exactly when Barnaby first heard Lord Dreadmore’s name and whether he reacted with appropriate dread or just mild inconvenience.

Mark Milestones with Bookmarks

Draft complete. Revision complete. Sent to beta readers. Sent to editor. These are moments worth marking.

Create named bookmarks from the bookmarks panel — timestamp anchors in your workspace’s history. Name them meaningfully: First Draft Complete, Before Structural Revision, Before Killing Off Gandrick (Again), After Beta Feedback. Add a description of where the manuscript stands at that moment.

Bookmarks are particularly useful when you’re about to do something drastic:

Before cutting a character or a subplot, bookmark the current state
Before restructuring the act breaks, bookmark so you can compare before and after
Before submitting to an agent, mark the version you sent
Before deciding whether Gandrick actually dies this time or merely appears to die for the fourth time

They’re lightweight and timestamped. Create as many as your process demands, or none at all — they’re there when you need them.

Use Search as a Continuity Net

The prophecy was introduced in Chapter 3. It was described one way by Gandrick, a slightly different way in Chapter 7, and in Chapter 11 it appears to have acquired a new clause about a sacred artifact that Gandrick insists was always there.

Press Cmd+K to open the command palette and search for prophecy. Full-text search covers page titles and body content across your entire workspace. You will discover it has been described inconsistently across seven chapters. This is either a catastrophic continuity failure or the central dramatic irony of the novel. Either way, now you know.

Search as a continuity assistant:

Search a character’s name to find every page that mentions them
Search a plot element to verify you set it up before it pays off
Search Gandrick to map exactly how many times he has almost died and whether the pacing holds
Search unremarkable to see if you’ve used the joke too many times or not enough

If something appears somewhere unexpected — or you’ve been quietly inconsistent about a detail — search surfaces the evidence. That’s better than finding it after the manuscript goes to print.

Use the Agent for Brainstorming

Pro+Agent When you’re stuck — on a plot problem, a character motivation, an ending that won’t come together — the built-in agent can serve as a thinking partner that already knows your world.

The agent has access to your workspace. It can read your character pages, your chapter notes, your world documents. Ask it to identify where the subplot-pip-real-hero arc drops its thread, suggest why Lord Dreadmore chose aesthetics over practicality as his primary operating principle, or propose structural alternatives when Barnaby’s denial phase is running long and needs a complication to move him forward.

This isn’t autocomplete. The agent doesn’t write your novel — it helps you think through the problems that are blocking you, using the material you’ve already built. The quality of that thinking depends on the quality of your notes, which is another reason to build the scaffolding well.