Quick Start

Whether you write novels or non-fiction, Sudowrite is the fastest way to get your ideas out of your head and onto the page… but before you can get started, it helps to know your way around the software.

Today we’ll review Sudowrite’s interface and features, and showcase how you can use it to brainstorm, write, edit, and stay organized.

For starters, I'm going to click this Home button in the upper left so we can start from the Sudowrite homepage. The homepage is where all of your projects appear.

Projects are represented by these little cards, which showcase a project title, a snippet from the first document inside of the project, a word count and an edited date. These three buttons expand a menu that will let you delete a project—and if you have deleted a project, you’ll see a Trash over here. This is also where you’ll find a Plugins button—Plugins are user-created features, which are a bit more advanced, so we’ll cover those in another video but feel free to explore them on your own too.

Down here on the right are some pinned resources and reference materials—for example, this link to our live classes.

In the upper right here, you'll see a gear. This is the Settings for Sudowrite. If I expand it, I'll see my Account Details, but then also some Controls so I can customize my Sudowrite experience—everything from the font and text size to line spacing to the actual color palette that Sudowrite uses here in the Theme.

Now I'm going to click into an existing project here to get started. Let’s begin by taking a quick look at the Sudowrite user interface. There are four main sections of it that you should know about. The primary section right here is the Editor. On its own, this rich text editor should look familiar, like Google Docs or Microsoft Word. You’ll see a Find & Replace button and formatting options along the top here.

Off to the right, you see a History section, which is where “cards” with AI-generated text will appear when you use most of Sudowrite’s AI features. The card gives you the chance to review the AI-generated text before inserting it into your document, and you can always refer back to it—or even star it to save it in a short list for later.

In this left bar, you'll see the name of your project up top, and then all of the documents inside of your project down below. Documents are often chapters, but you can actually organize this section however you like. Your Documents will be titled automatically once you've written a sufficient amount inside of the body of the doc, but you can also rename them either by clicking on the three dots or by double-clicking the title. The same goes for your project title—rename it by clicking on it.

You can add a new document by clicking Add New, or you can upload an existing document from your computer.

The fourth section of the interface is the feature toolbar along the top. These are the main AI features of Sudowrite, which you can learn more about by hovering your cursor over… but we’ll dive into them right now.

Let’s start with Brainstorm. If I click on it, I'm prompted with this, which lets me select from any of the different things I could brainstorm. No matter what you select, the Brainstorm tool looks and works the same—it just changes the prepopulated sample text for your reference.

Click the refresh button to change the sample text up—or provide your own Brainstorm prompt.

Once I click Start, I'm sent directly into the Brainstorm flow. I can use the little thumbs up to add something to my keepers list, or the thumbs down if I don’t like something and want to receive a new suggestion. Once I have a Keepers list I'm happy with, I can click Save and Exit, and you'll see the results of that Brainstorm session appear in my history column.

There is another way to brainstorm, and that's by using what we call Quick Chat—one of Sudowrite’s Quick Tools. You’ll find Quick Chat inside of the Quick Edit panel—and you can get to that from the hover menu that appears when you highlight something, or by using the keyboard shortcut, which is Control K on a PC or Command K on a Mac.

Opening that window allows you to toggle to what we call Quick Chat. This is where you can ask a question, say… ask for some interesting settings for your Sci-Fi story. Quick Chat can see what you highlight, along with the context of your other documents, and make a suggestion.

Unlike Brainstorm, the results of a Quick Chat are not saved to your history, which means this is best for spur of the moment asks that you may not need to refer back to.

With Brainstorming out of the way, let’s look at Writing on Sudowrite. To help illustrate this next point, I’ve added a sample story to this document. When writing it I got stuck… but if I want Sudowrite to help me continue it, I just click the Write button.

The Write button is like a super advanced autocomplete that gives me suggestions on how to proceed. It won't change anything in the body of my document, but instead it will generate cards in the History column. If you want a little more control over how write works, you can click this arrow to the right of the button—here you’ll find Guided Write, which provides or accepts generalized suggestions on how to proceed, and Tone Shift, which works just like Write but in a tone that maps to whatever you select here. You also have full control over Write’s Auto mode here in the settings… in case you wanted to crank up the creativity, change the length of the cards that are produced, or even toggle prose modes. (Prose modes will change the output a bit, since you’re essentially changing the AI that’s doing the work for you.)

Now, if in the course of writing you realize you need to flesh out some details, you can use what we call the Describe button. So if I highlight "ancient items and mystical objects" here, I can use the Describe button to get a more detailed description of those things. Clicking this dropdown to the right of Describe will show you all of the senses that Describe will generate a card for—if you don’t need to smell the high school locker room, make sure you toggle that off before clicking Describe on that phrase. When clicking Describe, you'll see the results in the right column just like other AI outputs. Along the bottom of each card here you’ll see both an Insert and a Copy button, but you can also highlight any section that works for you, copy it, and just paste that into your document.

When it comes to editing your work, you have a few options available. I mentioned Quick Edit earlier—that’s available from the hover menu when you highlight something, but also by the Command K / Control K shortcut. Quick Edit is about as simple as it gets—just tell it what you want to change about your work. You can say “expand on this,” “rephrase this” or “change this to first person.” You’ll get a struck-through version of your original prose, and underlined in green you’ll see the suggested replacement—which you can then accept, reject, or further edit by providing follow-up instructions.

The other main way to edit is with what we call the Rewrite button. Just highlight a section you’d like to rewrite, up to 650 words, then click Rewrite. A Rewrite selector will appear in the History bar, where you’ll choose how you want the Rewrite to work—shorter, more show, not tell, or even if I want to do something custom. So I can customize this and say, be more quirky or make this really dark and foreboding. For now, let's just use rephrase. When I say go, Rewrite gets to work. And you'll see the rephrase suggestion appears in my right column here. If I like what I see and I click Insert, it replaces the text that I already had highlighted.

Finally, when it comes to staying organized on SudoWrite, there are two main ways for you to do that. The first is Canvas, which is a visual way to stay organized. If you’re someone who likes to visually map things out before you get to work, Canvas lets you do that. You can generate full outlines, move cards around, even visualize and track your character relationships here.

The other way to stay organized is called Story Bible, and it’s one of Sudowrite’s more advanced features. Story Bible is a place for structured notes— it’s where you can put all of the details you know for sure about your story. So you'll see Braindump, Genre, Style, Synopsis, Characters, and Outline. The idea is everything you know for sure can go here, but anything you don't know or want a little help with can be generated with some help from AI.

So once you've added a Braindump and a Genre and a Style, you could generate a Synopsis. If the generation doesn't map to your vision, you can manually change that before proceeding to the next step. You have the option to generate something like a characters list (which would pull in any characters you’ve already mentioned, while generating some new ones)... but you can also bring your own character list entirely

The goal is to fill out your entire Story Bible and gather those essential storytelling components in one place. If you complete your Story Bible, you even have the option to generate chapter-by-chapter prose… you would do that using the Chapter Generator in a document. The best part is, with a full Story Bible, tools like Write get smarter—they’ll refer to your genre, tone, and character list to make sure they’re sticking to the project parameters you’ve defined.

Story Bible is powerful, and quick to learn, but more difficult to master. For a deep dive on it, I’d recommend attending one of our live classes, or even joining our super active Sudowrite community Discord server where we share class recordings.

That’s it for our introduction, but let us know what questions you might have in the comments here. See you in the Discord, and Happy Writing.