Why we're building Scribsy
I've had a head full of worlds since I fell in love with the works of Robert Jordan as a kid. School was a problem. I spent my share of time sitting outside the principal's office, and every minute of it was earned by reading novels under the desk instead of the textbook on top of it.
As the years went by, I started calling those worlds my Narnia closets. They have been the perfect escape, and I always knew that someday I would get them onto the page. Then life did what life does.
Wanting to write epic science fiction and fantasy has never been a secret of mine, and it comes up every time I get to know someone new. What I never expected was how many people answer with "me too." Romance, mystery, memoir, self-help, poetry, children's picture books, you name it. Almost everyone I meet is carrying something.
I have tried to get my own worlds onto the page several times. I built custom wikis. I wrote automations to catch ideas while they were still fresh. I turned the wikis into relational databases so I could link to them inline while I drafted. At one point I had something I was genuinely happy with, and it was working for me. Life got in the way again, and by the time I came back, an update to the underlying app had broken my automations and poisoned the structure of the wiki. Years of worldbuilding, tangled.
I also tried letting a model write for me. I rewrote every line of it, because none of it was mine.
When I surveyed the tools available to writers again this year, what I found was a slew of products promising to do the writing for me. That is the one job I never wanted help with. Seth Rogen recently put words to something I felt: "The idea of a tool that makes me write less is not appealing to me, because I like writing."
So I built Scribsy for myself, and for everyone I have met who has a book or a series or an entire universe in them and struggles to get it out. Scribsy is for writers who like writing. It never writes your prose. What it does is carry the part that's only lived in someone's head: the hundreds of people, places, promises and secrets that shift across a hundred thousand words. You write the words. Scribsy holds the world.
I know what it's like to have more to say about a world than anyone has time to hear. Scribsy has room for all of it. And the bigger that world grows, the more there is to keep straight. Past a certain size, holding a world takes more than one person, which is what a team does for the authors who have one. Scribsy is built to do that job for a writer working alone. Keeping track of the story shouldn't leave you less time to tell it. There are millions of people who have the story and lack the time, the tools, or the confidence to finish it. I think a world with a million more finished stories is a better one.
Dreamers were imagining artificial intelligence long before it became an industry. The possibilities, the way people would talk to machines, the ethical lines: writers worked through all of it for generations before any of it was built. I take a lot of hope from that, because the people I built this for have helped us imagine what comes next. And I don't believe a machine's ability to put words on a page makes the story you've been carrying any less worth telling.
Writers deserve more. More than a blank page with nothing behind it. More than an app that tells you it writes better than you do. Writers deserve tools that treat them and their craft with respect, and the freedom to work with new technology without worrying about who ends up owning their words. That last one is why the Writer's Data Pledge exists, and why it is published where you can read it before you sign up for anything. After what happened to my own worldbuilding, being able to take your work with you matters to me as much as what you can do with it inside Scribsy.
I want to say plainly: Scribsy doesn't write prose because that is the tool I want for myself. I am not handing anyone a rule. Plenty of writers are going to keep a model open in the window next to this one. Some of them will bring that work into Scribsy, and I am not going to tell them their book counts for less than mine. It was never mine to rank. I would rather help you preserve the history of your work and leave you in control of what you share.
How you write is yours to decide. Scribsy gives back as much or as little help as you want on a given day, and it keeps up with what you have made while you make it. When you type the last line, your manuscript's life is only just beginning, and what you carry forward is the world you built alongside the words, structured and yours, ready for whatever you want to do with it next.
I built the tool I always wanted, and I finally get to use it. I'd like to help you get your worlds out of your head too.
Let's make yours one of a million more finished stories.
