Chapter 15 · Formats

Writing a Novel

A novel project gives you a full word processor and one long document to write in. Chapters are lines in the draft that Storskarvia recognises, and the navigator, the binder and the per-chapter files in your storage are all built from that recognition. Here is what counts as a chapter, what to do when your title is too interesting to be recognised, and why the page number at the bottom of the screen is an estimate.

One continuous draft

You can write a whole novel in one document and scroll through it the way you would read it. Chapters live inside that document, so there is no step where you stop writing to create Chapter Twelve before you can start it. Press Enter and keep going.

The binder still holds as many documents as you want, and larger books usually use a few. Binder folders are called Parts in a novel project, and the ⇄ button on any binder row moves a document into one.

How Storskarvia finds your chapters

A paragraph becomes a chapter boundary when it is 60 characters or shorter and one of these is true:

Shape	Examples
Opens with a structural word: chapter, part, book, prologue, epilogue, interlude, act, preface, preamble, foreword, afterword, introduction, dedication, acknowledgements, appendix, coda	Chapter Seven, Prologue, Part Two: The Thaw
A line holding only a number of up to three digits, optionally followed by . : or )	7, 12.

Matching ignores case, so CHAPTER ONE and Chapter one both count. Sections opening with prologue, preface, preamble, foreword, introduction or dedication are filed as front matter, and epilogue, afterword, acknowledg, appendix or coda as back matter. Everything else is a chapter.

A real heading always wins. Once a line is a heading, its text can be anything at all and Storskarvia treats it as a boundary without consulting the list above, which is why the next section matters more than this one.

Promoting a chapter yourself

Detection is a courtesy for the way most drafts are typed. Titling your chapters "The Long Winter" and "What Mara Knew" is better writing and worse for a pattern match, so promote them instead of relying on the guess. Three equivalent ways:

• Put the cursor in the line and press ⌘⌥1. ⌘⌥0 turns a heading back into body text.
• Click the Chapter card in the Home ribbon's style gallery. The cards are Body, Chapter, Section and Subsec, and the one matching the cursor is lit.
• Click the +H button beside a detected chapter in the Outline. It appears only for lines Storskarvia detected and you have not promoted.

Auto-headings, under the View ribbon, does the promoting for you. It is off by default, and once on it promotes one detected chapter at a time after a short pause, skipping the line the cursor sits in so it never reformats the sentence you are typing. It is remembered per browser rather than per account.

The +H button and Auto-headings act on ordinary paragraphs only. Pointed at a line that is already a heading, or at a list item, the promote does nothing and says nothing.

The navigator and the binder

The left-hand rail is headed Outline. It lists every heading and every detected chapter in order, each with a word count for the material underneath it, and clicking one jumps the cursor there. Whichever entry covers the top of your screen is highlighted as you scroll.

Sub-entries appear too. When a paragraph holds nothing but a divider (* * *, ---, ~~~, ###, or a single ornament such as ✳, up to 12 characters), the paragraph after it is listed as a subsection, labelled with its first 42 characters. Those carry no word count and are skipped when chapters are counted.

The same structure reaches the project page. A document with more than one detected section lists its chapters as rows under its binder entry, each tagged Opening, Chapter, Front matter or Back matter with its word count, and each opening the editor at that chapter. A document with one section shows no rows, which is the expected state for one you just started.

The Outline board and the Codex, which hold structure at project scale, are Part V. How to outline a novel covers the planning side.

Scene breaks and page breaks

A scene break is the pause inside a chapter. Insert one from the Home ribbon, or with Scene Break on the Insert ribbon, and it prints as a centred * * *. An inserted break is a rule rather than a paragraph, so it makes no subsection entry in the navigator; a divider you type as text does.

A page break forces what follows onto a new page. It sits on the Insert ribbon beside Image, Table and Footnote, which have their own chapter. That ribbon appears for novel documents only.

Styles and typography

Body paragraphs carry a first-line indent, the first paragraph after a heading does not, and Chapter and Section headings are centred. That follows from the style you apply rather than from anything you set.

The Home ribbon carries the document's appearance: Typeface (Charter, Georgia, Palatino, Times New Roman, Baskerville, Courier, Helvetica), size, and line spacing at 1.5, 1.75, 2.0 or 2.4. All three are saved with the document, and they are what the page estimate below measures.

Appearance belongs to the owner. In someone else's manuscript the typeface, size and spacing controls are disabled and say "The document owner sets this." Reviewers cannot apply formatting at all, because a formatting change is not something suggestion mode can track. Part VII covers what each role can do.

How a novel paginates

Faint numbered lines cross the paper where pages would end, and the status bar reads Page 4 of 26. Both come from measuring the rendered height of your text against a US Letter shape derived from the paper's width. It is a live guide, responsive to typeface, size, spacing and zoom, and deliberately approximate. The number to quote to anybody else comes from a typeset PDF export, laid out with true print metrics, in Part VIII.

A third page currency is the one agents and publishers mean. Turn on Manuscript pages in the View ribbon and the count at the top gains a second figure at 250 words to the page, always labelled "manuscript" so the two can never be confused. Like Auto-headings, it is remembered per browser. Insights, on the Review ribbon, adds chapter count, average chapter length and reading time; word counts, sessions and daily goals have their own chapter.

What your storage receives

Alongside the master files described in Chapter 3, a novel document gets a folder of per-chapter plain-text copies, numbered and named in the form 01 - Opening.txt. They are for reading and backing up chapter by chapter. The master file stays the source of truth, and nothing you edit in a chapter file comes back.

Two conditions govern them. Storskarvia writes them only when the document has at least two detected sections, so a single-chapter document produces none, and it writes none at all under zero retention, because an extra derived copy is what that setting exists to prevent.

When it does not behave

What you see	What is happening
A chapter is missing from the Outline	Its title does not match the detected shapes, or the line is longer than 60 characters. Promote it with ⌘⌥1.
An ordinary sentence is listed as a chapter	It is short and opens with a structural word, such as a line reading "Part of me knew." Leave it: the entry is navigation and changes nothing about your text.
The binder shows no chapter rows	Fewer than two sections have been detected in that document.
Auto-headings did nothing	It promotes only lines detection already found, and waits until the cursor is elsewhere. An undetectable title still needs promoting by hand.
The page total jumped	You changed typeface, size, spacing or zoom. The estimate is measured from the rendered page, so it moves with it.
A toggle you set yesterday is off	Auto-headings and Manuscript pages live in the browser, not the account. Another machine, another browser or a cleared cache starts from the defaults.
No chapter files in your Dropbox or Drive	The document has one section, or it has zero retention on.

Updated 2026-08-22 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?

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