Guides

How to use Local Writing App, from an empty window to writing your own AI prompts. New here? Start with Getting started.

• Getting started

  Welcome. This guide walks you from an empty window to a project with a scene you've written, a character in your lore, and — if you want it — AI switched on. Ten minutes, start to finish.

• Lore

  Lore is your story's memory — the characters, places, factions, objects, and ideas worth keeping straight. Each item is an Entry: a title, a Markdown body, and whatever fields its type carries.

• Custom fields

  Every Entry in your Lore — a character, a location, an item — can carry fields: the pieces of information you want to keep about it. A character's age, a location's ruler, whether a faction has been introduced yet.

• Mutations

  Your lore entries store a current value — a character's rank, a location's owner, what a detective knows.

• Views

  Every list in the app — your scenes, your characters, your research — is produced by a view: a small query that decides which items appear and how they're ordered and grouped.

• Plotting

  The plot board is a canvas for planning the shape of your story alongside the prose.

• Turning on AI

  AI in this app is off until you turn it on, and even then it's a tool you point at your prose, not a service that runs on its own.

• Ollama context

  Running a model locally through [Ollama](https://ollama.com) is the private, offline heart of this app — but a local model treats its context differently from a cloud one.

• Writing prompts

  A prompt is the instruction the app sends to the AI for you: continue this scene, tighten this paragraph, flesh out this character.

• Context picker

  Give a prompt its own + Context button (or several) that opens a constrained, drill-in menu of the things the author allows the writer to pull in. The author decides what's pickable; the writer just picks.

• What the AI sees

  You never paste your world into a prompt by hand.

• How your prose is steered

  The prose actions are Draft scene, Continue, Expand, Describe, Rephrase, Shorten, Line edit, Show, don't tell, Tighten grammar and Finalize roleplay.

• Roleplay

  Have two (or more) characters take turns in a single scene. Each /roleplay <Name> invocation generates that character's next beat, in voice, with their own conversation history reconstructed from the scene body.

Reference

• Prompt reference

  Everything you can write inside a prompt: every value, call, filter and tag, and what each one gives you back. New to prompts? Start with [Writing prompts](#guide:writing-prompts), then use this page to look things up.