Everything in WriteCarrot, and where to find it

A story is one piece of writing: a chapter, a short story, a post, a scene. A garden is the project that holds them, such as a novel or a collection. Almost everything else is a way of writing, revising, or understanding what's in a garden.

Write

The editor, plus quicker ways to add words: Add Words, Timed Entry, County Road, and Word War.

Revise

Weeding and Tend hand you one flagged line at a time. Declunk, Diminish, Rewrite, and Craft Map go deeper.

Understand

Reports score each piece. Reader Questions, gap finders, and the cast and place rosters look across the whole garden.

Plan

Focus, the writing calendar, the Book Roadmap, and brainstorming.

Keep going

Streaks, work points, and gardens that show when they've gone dry.

AI in WriteCarrot works on what you've written. It scores pieces, flags lines, lists the questions a reader would be asking, builds cast and place rosters, summarizes gardens, and talks things through in chat or on a call. The Assistant, the chats, and the calls are all instructed not to write manuscript prose for you.

Suggestions

In one line-editing pass, Rewrite offers a few alternative versions of a single sentence. Reorganize can suggest a paragraph order. Neither is applied unless you choose it.

Generated

Summaries, reports, cover art, and the read-aloud voice are made by AI.

Optional

Ignore every AI feature and you still have an editor, streaks, and a home for your book.

Pick it back up

On a fresh visit, a carousel shows up to five stories you edited most recently. Edit reopens one where you stopped. Not now closes it.

Today

Three tiles: today's focus, words today, and your streak.

Featured garden

One garden is put forward because it's ready to pick back up, has the most momentum, or is your current focus. Its next best thing is shown with it.

Every garden

Each shows how recently it was watered. Filter by Novels, Collections, Posts, or Screenplays.

Navigation rail

On a computer it opens from the left edge and can be pinned open. On a phone, tap the menu button. It includes a story search and four groups: Home, All writing, Community, and Account. Open a garden or a story and the rail adds that garden's or story's tools.

Quick Jump

Press ⌘K (Ctrl+K on Windows) and type to jump to any page, story, or garden. Type "listen" and a title to start story radio, or type a question to ask the Assistant.

Carrot logo

Click it to open the Assistant.

A new account with nothing in it starts at Sprout. You claim a garden and choose its look (Cozy Farm, Moonlight Greenhouse, or Wild Meadow), then decide whether to try the guided draft.

Plant, Water, Harvest

A guided first draft in three steps. Skip it if you already have something to work on.

Tour

A short tour of Pause · home and Field actions follows.

Week one

After your first harvest, Sprout sets a few missions for your first week.

Find it: Offered to new accounts. Later, open it from Pause · home.

On a garden, choose to add stories, then paste Markdown or upload a file. WriteCarrot splits the text into separate stories at its headings, so a manuscript with a heading per chapter arrives as chapters. Loose stories that don't belong to a garden can be imported from the Granary.

Find it: A garden's page, or the Granary.

The Granary is your full inventory: every story with its scores and harvest tier, from seeds (pieces under 100 words) to mature work.

Each story has its own page, the manuscript, with the text and a button for every mode: Edit, Speed Read, Diminish, Rewrite, Declunk review, Report, Timed Entry, and Add Words.

Find it: Navigation rail → All writing → Granary. New story is in the same group.

A garden's page gathers everything about the project. Along the top are Tend, Chat, Call, Continue latest, Write on the road, and New story.

At a glance

A summary of the garden, its growth score, narrative progress and publication readiness as percentages, and its draft stage.

The pieces

The farm plot and the story list, with nested plots for grouping chapters into parts.

What needs work

The next best thing, plus story, character, and place gap finders.

Kept alongside

Garden notes, garden seeds, and the constitution.

AI upkeep

A menu that refreshes the garden's summaries, outlines, and reports when you ask.

Find it: Navigation rail → All writing → Gardens, then open one.

The four formats are Novel, Story collection, Posts, and Screenplay. WriteCarrot can detect the format from what's in the garden, and you can set it yourself or re-detect it when you edit the garden.

Wording

Pieces are called chapters, stories, posts, or scenes to match.

Posts

Fiction-only checks and the literary-agent call stay out of the way. Reports score what matters for a post, such as the hook, the evidence, and platform fit.

Screenplays

Write in Fountain, the plain-text screenplay format. WriteCarrot recognizes scene headings, action, character cues, and dialogue, and reports read the piece as a script.

One piece

A single story can be given its own form: Fiction, Long-form post, Social post, or Screenplay.

Find it: Edit garden → Format.

Writing in a piece waters it. WriteCarrot counts the days since and shows the state wherever the garden or story appears.

Watered

Written in today.

Fresh

Written in yesterday.

Thirsty

Two or three days dry. It says so by name: "The Ferry Year is thirsty — a page would help."

Wilting

Up to a week.

Parched

Up to two weeks.

Asleep

Longer than that. One sentence wakes it.

The gardens page also keeps a season and the week's weather, based on how many of your gardens got rain. A week with none is a dry spell.

The farm plot shows the whole garden at once. Each piece carries a score ring, and the lowest-scoring piece is marked so you know where to look first. Small markers show which pieces have notes, structure, or reader questions. Group related pieces into a nested plot to keep parts or acts together.

Find it: A garden's page.

Each garden names the single most useful thing to do next and says why. Press Do it to go straight there. If it doesn't suit the day, Something else offers an alternative.

It can suggest

Editing, a story gap, a character gap, a place gap, County Road, a new chapter, outlining, brainstorming, or reader questions.

Find it: The featured garden on the gardens page, and each garden's own page.

Garden covers

Generate cover on a garden's page. You can generate a new one later.

Chapter art

Each piece can have its own art.

Scene backdrop

With Scene Backdrop on in Settings, the editor paints the place you're writing about behind the page. Reroll it if it misses.

Places

Places in your roster can be illustrated too.

Images are painted in the background. Keep working and the art appears when it's ready.

Novel-shaped asks for one sentence at a time: who your character is, the inciting incident, the choice that makes them act, the setback, the ending. Along the way it plays your sentences back to you. Finish, or quit early, and what you wrote is saved as a new garden with a first story to build on.

Find it: Navigation rail → All writing → Novel-shaped.

Export Markdown

On a garden's page, download the whole garden as Markdown.

Daily backup

A garden can email you a Markdown backup on days it changes.

By date

In Settings, Export stories by date downloads a JSON export for a date range, optionally limited to one garden.

Saving

Work saves automatically. Earlier versions are kept under Previous copies. If the same chapter was changed in two places, WriteCarrot shows both, and the one you don't keep stays in Previous copies.

Editor tools

Structure opens an outline of the piece. Timers gives you a five-minute countdown or a stopwatch.

Shelves

Three shelves open from the edge of the page. Revise holds Speed Read, Diminish, Rewrite, Declunk, Tend, and Report. Ideate holds County Road, Brainstorm, and Notes. Evaluate holds Characters, Places, Reader Questions, and Craft Map.

Chapters

In a multi-chapter garden, step to the previous or next chapter from the editor or the rail.

Also here

Find and replace, a chat panel for the chapter, and, with audio on, Listen and Call.

On a phone

The editor becomes a writing sheet with the tools in a toolbar.

Find it: Open any story and choose Edit, or Editor in the rail.

The Structure tool reads a piece and lays out its scenes, the events in them, the threads running through, and how one thing causes the next. Refresh it after a rewrite, or copy the outline to use elsewhere.

Find it: In the editor: rail → Editor tools → Structure.

Add Words

WriteCarrot sets a small target, between 20 and 100 words. Hit it and the words are added to your story. You can choose where in the piece they go.

Timed Entry

One minute on the clock. Write as much as you can, and it's added to the end of the story.

Find it: On a story: rail → Timed Entry or Add Words. Both are also on the manuscript page.

County Road is a drive with a journal. You write as the road moves, a reader's passing thoughts appear as prompts, and what you write can be sent to the story you choose. Your progress along the road is saved. It works for one story, one garden, or with no garden at all.

Find it: Navigation rail → All writing → County Road. Gardens and stories have their own.

Pick 5, 10, or 15 minutes, then find an opponent or play the computer. Each match has a code, so you can bring a particular writer in. The leaderboard has a Word Wars tab.

Find it: Navigation rail → Community → Word War.

With Ambush Mode on, the editor may interrupt you now and then with a quick challenge: a word war, a sprint, a line to weed, or a phone call from someone in the work. You choose how many a day: 1, 3, 5, or 10.

Your words

What you type in a sprint or word war goes into the draft at your cursor. A weed replaces the flagged sentence with your edit.

Dodging

You can dodge an ambush. It costs 5 work points.

Find it: Settings → Ambush Mode.

Listen

In the editor, Listen reads the piece. Select some text to hear just that.

Story radio

A small player that stays with you as you move around the app. Pause, resume, skip to the next passage, or change station to another story. Start it from Quick Jump by typing "listen" and a title.

Summaries

Garden cards can read out a pitch or a recap.

Needs audio turned on in Settings, under Spoken Phrases. The voice is AI-generated. If it isn't available, your browser's voice is used.

For days when you don't want to decide. WriteCarrot picks a story and puts you in it.

Find it: Navigation rail → All writing → Random piece.

Choose where to weed (the whole farm, one garden, or one story), choose a pass or let it surprise you, then pull a weed. WriteCarrot finds a line, tells you why it was flagged, and opens it in Rewrite or Diminish. Fix it yourself and pull the next.

Line polish

Clunky style, grammar and usage, passive voice, hedges and filler, and unintentional double meanings.

Scene & specificity

Unwritten scenes, scenes with no "when", and placeholders and vagueness. The scene passes are for fiction.

Surprise me

Each pull runs a random pass. In a garden with a constitution, hard-truth checks are mixed in.

Find it: In a garden: rail → Garden care → Weed. Across everything: Field actions → Pull weeds.

Start a session over one story, a garden, or everything. Aim it with a slider that runs from your weakest lines to your strongest, and pick which kinds of work to include.

Kinds of work

Every sentence, by quality. Sentence problems. Constitution fixes. Paragraph diminish.

In the session

One item at a time. Fix this opens the right tool and brings you back afterwards. Skip moves on.

At the end

A recap of lines improved, lines skipped, and work points earned.

Find it: Navigation rail → All writing → Tend, the Tend button on a garden, or the Revise shelf in the editor.

Rewrite steps through a piece a sentence at a time. Replace the sentence with your version, delete it, skip it, or move up to the whole paragraph in Diminish. When a line arrives from Weeding or Declunk, the reason it was flagged comes with it.

Suggestions

Sometimes a tightened version of your sentence is offered. In the quality pass, a few AI-drafted alternatives appear as well. Nothing changes unless you choose it.

Find it: A story's manuscript page, or the Revise shelf in the editor.

Declunk runs the same passes as Weeding, but on one story and all at once. Pick a pass, let it find the lines, and review them in order, rewriting each yourself.

Find it: A story's manuscript page, or the Revise shelf in the editor.

Choose a run of paragraphs and rewrite each one leaner. WriteCarrot compares your new version with the original and gives you feedback on the change. A recap shows what the session did.

Find it: A story's manuscript page, or the Revise shelf in the editor.

Reading at pace shows where the rhythm trips. Adjust the speed as it plays. The Revise shelf has a preview, so you can sample it without leaving the editor.

Find it: A story's manuscript page, or the Revise shelf in the editor.

Reorganize shows a piece as paragraph blocks you can drag. For a second opinion, Analyze Content asks AI to suggest an order, which you can apply or ignore. Nothing is saved until you save.

Find it: A story's manuscript page.

Skills are grouped into five branches: Language, Character, Scene, Structure, and Meaning. Choose one, scope it to everything, a garden, or a story, and WriteCarrot finds passages that need that skill. Practice is a paragraph-by-paragraph rewrite of those passages, with a short lesson on the skill.

Daily practice

An optional daily email links straight to one practice session.

Find it: Navigation rail → All writing → Craft Map.

Write your hard truths, one per line: point of view, tense, what a character would never say, anything that must hold. Add notes if you like. Then weed for violations. WriteCarrot looks for lines that break a rule and hands them to you one at a time.

Find it: In a garden: rail → Garden care → Story constitution.

Open a report and WriteCarrot reads the piece and scores it. The report is kept until the text changes, then refreshed the next time you open it. Pieces under 100 words are still seeds and don't get a full report.

Writing quality

Readability, grammar, vocabulary, style, voice, clarity, and consistency.

Story elements

Plot coherence, character development, emotional impact, originality, setting, description, theme, pacing, and dialogue.

Craft & depth

Interiority, show versus tell, tension, character consistency, specificity, openings, and transitions.

Also included

Genre, likely audience, how complete the piece is, time estimates, and a written analysis.

Find it: A story's manuscript page, or the Revise shelf in the editor.

WriteCarrot reads your chapters and lists the mysteries and promises a reader would be tracking. Each is marked Open, At risk, or Resolved, so a thread you set up in chapter two doesn't stay forgotten. It works for a whole garden or a single story.

Find it: In a garden: rail → Garden care → Reader Questions. In the editor: the Evaluate shelf.

Three finders look across a garden. Story gap finds the weakest narrative beat. Character gap picks a cast member and the chapter where their arc or presence needs work. Place gap does the same for a setting. Each gives you a short briefing on what to add or clarify, then offers to take you to the passage or to start brainstorming.

Find it: A garden's page, Pause · home, and Field actions.

Scan a garden and WriteCarrot builds its cast from the text. You can edit any profile, and merge duplicates when one person turns up under two names.

Who appears where

A grid of characters against chapters.

Relationship map

How the cast connects.

Chapter cast

Each story has its own list of who's in it.

Find it: In a garden: rail → Characters.

Places are pulled from your chapters the same way, and you can add one by hand. See where each place appears, how places connect, and a symbolic region map. Merge or nest places when two entries are really one.

Find it: In a garden: rail → Places.

The Assistant can see the state of your writing. Ask what to work on and it can recommend an activity, a craft skill to practise, a line to revise, or a story gap, and take you there. It can start a Word War too. It's built to nudge and route, not to write your story.

Find it: Click the carrot logo, or type a question into Quick Jump (⌘K).

Talk through a chapter: what a scene is doing, whether a motive lands, where to go next. Starter prompts cover characters, reader threads, places, and craft scores. In the editor, the chat sits beside the page.

Find it: On a story: rail → Chat with chapter.

Garden chat works from an overview of the entire garden and can pull in the full text of any piece when it needs to. Chats are saved. When something useful comes up, plant it as a seed.

Find it: In a garden: rail → Garden chat, or the Chat button on the garden's page.

A seed is an insight you planted from garden chat or from brainstorming. Seeds collect on the garden's page, marked planted, growing, or used. Any of them can be taken back into chat to develop.

Find it: A garden's page.

Press Call, choose what to talk about (the whole garden or one piece), and choose who to ring. The call is a spoken conversation in short turns, one question at a time. Whoever is on the line is told not to write your prose for you. A transcript is saved to that story's or garden's chat.

People

Your editor, your ideal reader, a literary agent (fiction only), the skeptic, a subject expert, and your writing coach.

Characters

Anyone in your cast.

The story itself

Let the piece talk about itself.

Needs audio turned on in Settings, and permission to use your microphone.

Find it: The Call button in the editor and on a garden's page.

A focus names one story or one garden as your main work for a day, a week, or a month. Work on it earns double work points. Focus is optional, and nothing is locked until you set one.

Focus areas

Writing new content, revising a chapter, weeding, Craft Map practice, story planning, character development, and world building, among others. The area decides which tool Jump in opens.

Also

A word goal, a note to yourself, and scheduled sessions.

Nudges

If you've been idle, WriteCarrot may suggest something. You can skip it.

Find it: Navigation rail → Home → Focus.

Pause · home shows your work-point total, your gardens, and Today's field: a single suggested move with the reason for it. Under More ways in you'll find your focus, Jump in — today's mode, gap jump-ins, and Mix it up, which offers something different and can be rerolled.

Find it: Navigation rail → Home → Pause · home.

The writing calendar plans ahead. Fill it with Quick (free), which builds a schedule from the state of your gardens, or Smart (AI). Edit any block's title, activity, date, and time. Changes save automatically. Export .ics puts the sessions in your own calendar, with a link back to each activity. There's one calendar for everything, and one for each garden and story.

Digest

An optional daily email lists today's blocks. It's off until you turn it on.

Find it: Navigation rail → Home → Writing calendar. In a garden: rail → Calendar.

The roadmap lists a garden's chapters and the beats inside them. Mark chapters Planned, Needs outline, Drafted, Revision, or Done. An interview and a planning chat help you work out what's missing. They summarize beats and decisions rather than writing the prose.

Find it: In a garden: rail → Roadmap.

Brainstorming is a canvas, not a chat. Drop thoughts onto it, group them into clusters, and link them to stories or chapters. The ones worth keeping can be planted as garden seeds. Open it from a story and it's anchored to that chapter.

Find it: In a garden: rail → Brainstorming. In the editor: the Ideate shelf.

Workspace notes are for planning and reminders that don't belong to one story. Gardens and stories have their own notes, kept with them.

Find it: Navigation rail → Home → Workspace notes.

Field actions is a directory: story, character, and place gaps, Pull weeds, Check hard truth (constitution weeding), County road, Craft Map, Word war, the Granary, and Today's field. It also links to Tend the plots, a light milestone game where beds unlock as your words and work points add up.

Find it: Navigation rail → All writing → Field actions.

Streaks are counted for you from your writing: a day counts when you add to or change a story. There's a streak for everything you write, and one for each garden and each story. Miss a day and the count starts again. Your longest streak is kept.

Find it: The Streak tile on the gardens page, and your profile.

Writing in the editor earns about a point for every ten words. You also earn points for hitting an Add Words target, fixing lines in Rewrite, Diminish, and Tend, practising on the Craft Map, and completing an ambush. Dodging an ambush costs five.

Find it: Your total is on Pause · home and your profile.

Five tabs: Work Points, Word Wars, Gardens, Total Words, and Time Spent.

Find it: Navigation rail → Community → Leaderboard.

Your profile shows words, stories, gardens, work points, and active streaks, with tabs for Overview, Achievements, and Activity. The Activity tab marks the days you wrote on a calendar. Once at least one story has a report, you get a writer score with five dimensions: sentence structure, storytelling, pacing, style and voice, and craft and depth.

Find it: Navigation rail → Account → Profile.

Spoken Phrases

Audio cues and encouragement. Read aloud, story radio, and calls need this on.

Dark Mode

A dark theme for the app.

Color Level

Change the background color as you level up.

Scene Backdrop

Paint the place you're writing about behind the editor.

Ambush Mode

Editor surprises, and how many a day. Off by default.

Email

Separate switches for Product email, Getting started, Weekly recap, Report highlights, Daily Craft Map practice, and Writing calendar digest.

Export

Export stories by date.

Find it: Navigation rail → Account → Settings.

Enter an email address and WriteCarrot sends an invitation with a link to register.

Find it: Navigation rail → Account → Invite.