Guides
Getting the details right.
Practical, no-filler guides on the parts of writing that reward care: accuracy, format, and continuity. From the studio built to check them.
Writing a period piece? Check a scene for anachronisms with our free checker. No signup, and the AI writes no prose.
How to Build a Story Bible
What belongs in a story bible, how to structure characters, places, and world rules, and how to keep it from drifting out of sync with your draft.
How to Fact-Check Your Novel
Fiction still has to get its facts right. A practical, step-by-step method for catching real-world and internal errors before a reader does.
Screenplay Format: A Complete Guide
Every element of standard screenplay format, the rules that actually matter, and the folklore you can safely ignore.
How to Keep Continuity in a Long Novel
Why details drift over four hundred pages, and a system for keeping eyes, timelines, and props consistent to the last chapter.
How to Outline a Novel (Without Killing the Magic)
Beat sheets, treatments, and the headlights method: how much structure actually helps a novel, and how to keep an outline true once the draft starts arguing back.
How to Write a Video Essay Script
A video essay lives or dies on its argument. How to structure one, write narration for the ear, plan the visual lane, and get the facts right before you record.
How to Research Historical Fiction
Where to find real period detail, how deep to dig, how to keep the research out of your prose, and how to verify the draft against the actual calendar.
How to Write Dialogue That Sounds Real
Why a transcript reads as fake, how subtext and register give characters separate mouths, dialect without phonetic spelling, and testing every line by ear.
Three-Act Structure: A Practical Guide
What the three acts actually do, where the act breaks and the midpoint fall, why act two sags, and how to use structure as a diagnostic instead of a formula.
How to Avoid Anachronisms in Period Writing
Why a wrong wristwatch survives four rereads, the five categories period errors cluster into, the things that are older than you think, and how to date every prop and phrase in a draft.
Point of View in Fiction: A Complete Guide
What first, second, third limited and omniscient each buy and cost, how psychic distance works, why head-hopping flattens a scene, and how to stop a narrator knowing what they were never told.
Self-Editing Your Manuscript: A Checklist
The five passes to run before anyone else reads the draft, in the order that stops you polishing prose you are about to cut, and why continuity and facts each need a pass of their own.
How to Keep Continuity Across a Series
One canon across every book or season: how to track what each character knows and when, keep a series calendar, and audit between installments.
Manuscript Format for Novel Submissions
The font, spacing, header and chapter layout agents expect, how to state a word count, and the typewriter-era rules you can safely drop.
Was That Word Used in 1890? How to Catch Anachronistic Language
Why OK is older than it sounds and stressed out is newer, how to date a word or idiom yourself, and when the modern word is right anyway.
Every writer deserves a staff
Storskarvia does everything for your draft except write it. Start free.