A manuscript is only part of a project.
Behind every draft is a layer of knowledge the reader never sees directly: who the characters are and what drives them, what a place looks like and what it means, how a world’s rules work, what you’ve researched and what you still need to check. That layer needs somewhere to live — close enough to reach while you’re writing, deep enough to hold real depth.
In Charc, that’s the boards.
Everything that feeds the manuscript
The boards — Characters, Setting, and any you add — are a structured knowledge base attached to your project. They don’t appear in exports by default, but they can be included if you want them: character sheets and world notes can be appended to an export as reference material. Most writers leave them out of the final document and use them purely as a writing aid.
What they’re for is keeping everything your manuscript needs — backstory, appearance, motivation, history, lore — organized, searchable, and always one click away.
Characters and setting
Characters and Setting share the same structure, and both sit on the rail of Plan mode. Click either one and its drawer lists the entries — each character, each place.
Click an entry to open its page, with its name at the top. The page shows everything you’ve written about that character or place, organized into blocks (more on those in a moment). While you’re on an entry, Blocks appears on the rail too, listing that entry’s blocks as a quick-jump list — useful once a character page gets long.
To add a new character or place, click “+ Add entry” in the drawer. The entry gets a default name you can edit immediately. There’s also a tags block beneath the name — use it for a role, a type, a status, whatever is most useful to you. A small icon to the left of the name can be clicked to assign a color, which tints the entry’s icon throughout the app.
Deleting an entry doesn’t permanently remove it. Like everything else in Charc, it goes to the Scrap Pile, where it can be restored.
The block system
Entity pages aren’t a fixed form. They’re built from blocks — discrete, labeled units of content that you can add, remove, reorder, and stack however your project needs.
These are the ones you’ll reach for most:
Fields — a structured grid of labeled text inputs. This is what the default Character Sketch and Setting Sketch blocks use. Each field has a label (Overview, Appearance, Personality, Motivation, Arc, Notes for characters; Overview, Atmosphere, History, Geography, Notes for settings) and a freeform text value. You can edit the field labels, add new fields, and remove ones you don’t use.
Text — a freeform rich text block with its own label. Use it for extended notes, backstory, research, anything that needs more than a short field value. Text blocks have an inline editor for quick edits and a full-screen editor for longer work (described in the next section).
Image — a single image, uploaded from your device. Useful for character references, maps, location photos, mood board images.
Chart — embeds a chart or table from Charts. Pin a character relationship matrix or a scene breakdown directly to the character page it belongs to.
Divider — a horizontal rule for visual separation between sections on a long page.
There are more besides: galleries, arcs, checklists, excerpts (a passage kept from the manuscript), appearances (where the entry turns up in the book), relations, sources, titles, shapes and ornaments. The entry’s own name, tags and aliases are blocks too, so they can sit wherever the page wants them.
To add a block, open Blocks on the rail and click “+ Add block”. A small picker lets you choose the type. Shift-click or Ctrl-click to select several blocks at once; they can be grouped, and dragged to reorder. Right-clicking a block gives you options to rename it, pin it to the reference panel, or send it to the Scrap Pile.
The tools at the bottom right switch an entry between Grid, with its blocks in columns, and Board, where cards sit anywhere, connect to each other and can be drawn on.
Text blocks and the document editor
Text blocks have two modes. On the entry’s page, the block renders as an inline rich text editor — click in and start typing, same toolbar as the Manuscript. This works well for notes that are a paragraph or two.
For longer writing — extended backstory, detailed world history, deep character analysis — click the expand icon (⤢) in the top-right corner of the block. This opens the document editor: a full-screen writing surface with the same rich text toolbar, a document name field at the top, a live word count, and a print button for a clean single-document printout. The back button (‹ Back) returns you to the entry, and everything is saved automatically as you write.
The document editor is available from the boards and also from Write — any text block pinned to the Reference panel can be opened into it from there.
More boards
Characters and Setting are built-in, but your project may need more. A magic system. A faction list. A research archive. A glossary of invented terms. More boards are exactly what they sound like: boards you add yourself, using the same block system as Characters and Setting.
To add one, click Add board on Plan’s rail. It offers Research, Magic, Religion and Symbolism, each with a starting block structure suited to that kind of content, and a Boards board for plot boards and faction maps. There’s also Custom… if none of those fit, where you name the board yourself and start from a blank page. Add board also brings back Characters, Setting, Relations or Charts if you’ve hidden them.
Research is available on every plan. Further custom boards are part of Publish.
A board you add behaves exactly like the built-in ones: its entries in the drawer, Blocks on the rail, the full block system. Right-click a board’s name to rename it. The board and all its entries go to the Scrap Pile if you remove it — nothing is permanently deleted.
Pinning to the reference panel
Every block, every outline node, every scene, every chart, every scrap item in Charc has a pin button. For blocks on a board it’s the 📌 icon in the block header. For outline nodes and scenes, it appears in the node’s action buttons. For charts, it’s in the Charts inspector.
Pinning something adds it to the Reference panel. In Write it docks at the right of the page and stays visible while you write; in the other modes it opens as a window you can move.
To open it, click Reference — it’s on every mode’s rail, and in the top bar.
The reference panel in full
Once you have content pinned, the Reference panel shows each item as a collapsible block with a title, a type icon, and a content area. Click a block header to expand or collapse it, and drag its bottom edge to resize it. Use the expand/collapse all toggle at the top of the panel to show or hide everything at once.
You can also add freeform notes directly in the panel itself — click the “+” button in the panel header to create a note block. Each note is a real document: it appears under Papers in the dashboard’s Documents block, can be opened in the full editor, and stays there if you later unpin it from the panel. Use them for things like writing-session reminders, questions to resolve, or anything else you want visible while you draft.
The panel persists across sessions. Pin something once and it stays there every time you open the project.
Snapshot comparison — The Reference panel is also where snapshot comparison lives. Pin a snapshot to the panel (from Drafts, on Write’s rail) and it appears as a compare block. Open it to see your current scene text alongside the snapshot version. Toggle the Compare mode to get a word-level diff: added text highlighted in one color, removed text in another. This makes it easy to see exactly what changed between a draft and an earlier version without leaving the editor.
Collaborator draft comparison works the same way. If you’re working on a shared project, collaborator drafts appear in Drafts and can be pinned to the Reference panel for a side-by-side read — with the same word diff available.
The loop
Put it all together and the workflow looks like this: you build your characters and world on the boards, writing as much or as little depth as your project needs. When you sit down to write a scene, you open the Reference panel, pin the characters who appear in it and the outline node for the scene, and start drafting with everything visible on the right. When you want to check whether you’ve drifted from an earlier version, you pin a snapshot and run a compare.
The manuscript is the output. The boards are the foundation it rests on.