Pipeline · Scenes · Step 2

Contract — the blueprint

The second step. Generate on the Intent produces the Contract — the Intent turned into a precise, structured brief the writer works from: the ordered events, the way it opens and closes, the emotional arc, and the explicit rules the prose must obey. This is what keeps the writing faithful to your plot instead of drifting.

The Contract tab — the scene plot on the left, a sidebar of starts/ends, emotional arc and Must/Forbidden/Sensory rule lists on the right, and a Regenerate-Text render bar with tier, continuity and word target at the bottom — Contract: the scene plot (left), the rules and arc (right), and the render bar that turns it into the Text (bottom).

What the Contract is

Where the Intent was a few readable paragraphs, the Contract is structured — a plot broken into ordered events, plus separate fields and rule lists the writer treats as law. It’s generated from the Intent, but nothing is locked: edit any part of it, and the change holds until you regenerate. Everything auto-saves, and a quiet continuity check runs on each save.

The scene plot

The large left panel is the scene plot — the events of the scene, in order, in the engine’s brief. A word count sits in the corner against a target (this is the blueprint’s size, kept short on purpose — it’s not the final prose). Select any span of text and an inline toolbarappears: refine or rewrite just that passage, or turn a line straight into a rule.

Starts, ends & the emotional arc

The top of the right sidebar holds three small fields: Starts (the opening move), Ends (the closing move) and the emotional arc — the feeling the scene travels through, written as a short chain (for example confident satisfaction → defensive unease → disturbed curiosity). Together they fix the scene’s shape: where it starts, where it lands, and the emotional distance between.

The rules — the guardrails

Below the arc are the rules, the heart of the Contract — grouped into three lists. Each is collapsible, each rule can be edited or deleted (✗), and each list has two ways to add: + Manual(write your own) or + Generate (let the engine draft a few from the scene):

Must

Things the writing has to do — the beats, lines and moves this scene is required to land. Imperative and specific (“X must recite the final line and receive applause before Y speaks”).

Forbidden

Things the writing must not do — the guardrails. Reveals held back, a character kept in place, a tone that must not break (“do not describe Y’s inner thoughts”; “do not let Z leave the bench yet”).

Sensory

Concrete sensory details to seed — the sights, sounds, smells and textures that ground the scene (“ozone from the generators”; “the faint creak of synthetic wood”). What keeps prose from going abstract.

The rules are your strongest per-scene lever. The writer obeys them literally — so a precise Must lands a beat you care about, a Forbidden keeps a reveal hidden or a tone intact, and a Sensory line stops the prose going abstract. Fixing a scene by editing one rule costs almost nothing; fixing it in the finished prose costs a full re-render.

Render the Text

The bar across the bottom is where the Contract becomes prose. It runs the full writing pipeline over everything above and produces the Text — the finished scene, which opens in the next tab. A progress stepper shows the four phases — Preparation → Planning → Writing → Review — with a live message as it works.

Regenerate Text

Runs the writer over the whole Contract and produces the finished scene — the Text (step 3). It reads “Create Text” the first time and “Regenerate Text” after. The result opens in the Text tab.

Tier

Bronze · Silver · Gold — the quality dial. Unlike the earlier steps, this one writes reader-facing prose, so this is where Gold earns its cost. Your own AI key (BYOK) appears as a fourth option.

Continuity

When on, the scene’s first paragraph is written to bridge from the previous scene’s ending — so consecutive scenes flow instead of restarting. Leave it off for a scene that opens a new thread.

Words

The finished scene’s length. It defaults to your book-wide setting (Book Settings → Style) and can be overridden here for this one scene — note it’s the prose length, larger than the Contract’s own count.

Get the Contract right — the events in order, the arc honest, the rules sharp — and hit Regenerate Text. The scene is written, and you move to the last step: reading and polishing the Text.