The Write tab is where the book actually gets written.
Everything else in Charc — the outline, the character sketches, the progress tracking — exists to support what happens here. So before you go deep on any of those, it’s worth spending some time in the editor itself: what it gives you, how it’s laid out, and what a writing session in Charc actually feels like.
The editor is the whole point
Charc’s editor is designed around one priority: staying out of your way. The toolbar is there when you need it and quiet when you don’t. The page fills the screen. The sidebar stays to the left, ready to jump you between scenes without pulling you out of the text.
The philosophy behind it is deliberately narrow. Charc is a drafting and writing environment — not a layout tool, not a word processor trying to do everything. The formatting you do in the editor shapes how your work reads while you’re writing it. What the final document looks like when it goes to a reader or a publisher is a job for export, handled separately and cleanly.
Pageless view and page view
At the top right of the Write tab, you’ll see two toggle buttons: Manuscript and Page.
Pageless view is the default. Your scenes scroll continuously, one after another, with generous whitespace and no hard page breaks. It’s built for getting words down — nothing interrupts the flow, and nothing reminds you how many pages you’ve written or haven’t. This is the view most writers spend most of their time in.
Page view renders your manuscript as a sequence of physical pages — white paper, proper margins, real typography, running headers. What you see is close to what will come out of a PDF export. It’s the view to reach for when you want to see the shape of your work: how a chapter fills the page, whether a scene is actually as short as it felt, how the whole thing is going to read to someone holding it.
You can toggle between them at any time. Your content is always the same — only the presentation changes. If you have a preference, you can set a default view in Settings so Charc always opens the way you want it.
The rich text toolbar
Above the editor is a toolbar with the formatting tools you’d expect. From left to right:
Undo / Redo — for in-session changes. More on this in a moment.
Font picker — a dropdown with a curated set of serif and sans-serif typefaces. Changing the font here affects the selected text, or sets the typing font at the cursor if nothing is selected. This is an editor preference, not an export setting — your export font is controlled separately.
Font size — 10pt through 18pt.
Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, subscript, superscript, small caps.
Text color and highlight — both with color pickers. Useful for drafting notes to yourself inline, or flagging passages that need revision.
Text styles — a dropdown with built-in paragraph styles: Body, Part Title, Chapter Title, Scene Heading, Quote. You can also save your own custom styles here.
Most of these are also available as keyboard shortcuts, covered in Post 4 of this series.
Scenes as the unit of writing
In Charc’s Write tab, you don’t write into one long document — you write into scenes. Each scene is a discrete block with its own editor, word count, and a synopsis you can expand or collapse above the text. This mirrors the structure you build in the Outline tab: every scene node you create there becomes a writing block here.
To add a new scene, click the “+ Scene” button at the top right of the toolbar, or hover between two existing scenes and click the separator that appears. Scenes can also be added from the sidebar: there’s a persistent “+ Add scene” button at the bottom of the scene list.
The left sidebar shows your full scene structure while you write. Click any scene name to jump to it instantly. The structure — acts, chapters, scenes — mirrors your outline and stays in sync as you work. You can collapse the sidebar entirely if you want the writing surface to yourself.
The synopsis above each scene is a quick reference to what the scene is supposed to do. You can show or hide it with the toggle arrow in the scene header. It doesn’t print or export — it’s just for you while you’re drafting.
Undo and snapshots
Ctrl+Z (or Cmd+Z on Mac) undoes changes in the current session. This works as you’d expect for in-progress edits — a few lines back, a reformatted paragraph, an accidental deletion. It’s fast and it covers most “wait, no” moments.
Snapshots are a different tool for a different purpose. A snapshot is a named, saved version of your full manuscript at a point in time — something you create intentionally before a major revision, or at the end of a productive session. Think of undo as an eraser and snapshots as a photograph: one fixes small mistakes, the other preserves a whole state of the work.
To take a snapshot, click the “Drafting” panel on the left side of the Write tab (the narrow panel to the left of the editor), then click “+ Save snapshot.” Give it a name — “End of Chapter 3,” “Before the restructure” — and it’s saved. You can restore, compare, or browse snapshots at any time from that same panel.
The reference panel
On the right side of the Write tab is a panel called Reference. Toggle it open with the icon in the top-right toolbar (the two-column icon, to the right of the Page view button).
The Reference panel is a place to pin anything from your project that you want visible while you write: a character sketch, a setting description, a scene from earlier in the manuscript, a chart, a scrap item, notes you’ve added yourself. You can pin content from anywhere — the Outline, Characters, Setting, Charts — using the pin button (📌) that appears on any item when you hover or right-click it. Once pinned, it appears in the Reference panel as a collapsible block you can read without leaving the editor.
It also surfaces your snapshots and collaborator drafts for side-by-side comparison, with a word-diff mode that highlights exactly what changed between versions.
The Reference panel gets its own post later in the series — there’s more to it than fits here. For now, know it exists, know how to open it, and try pinning a character you’re writing about to it. Having their sketch visible while you draft their dialogue is exactly what it’s for.
Focus mode
When you want everything to disappear except the words, press F11 or use the Focus mode shortcut (listed in the toolbar menu). The sidebar collapses, the top navigation hides, the editor expands to fill the screen, and a minimal floating toolbar gives you the formatting controls you might need. Word count stays visible at the top.
Press Escape or the same shortcut to exit. Your layout returns exactly as you left it.
What’s paid
Almost nothing in the editor is. Find and Replace (Ctrl+F and Ctrl+H), the full toolbar, focus mode, page view and every formatting tool are free on every account.
What the paid tiers extend is history and headroom, not writing. Free keeps ten saved snapshots and seven days of change history. Plus raises that to a hundred snapshots and thirty days. Pro keeps everything forever, and saves continuously as you type rather than periodically.
If you are drafting your first book on the free tier, none of that is in your way. It starts to matter later, once you have a year of revisions behind you and want to see how a paragraph looked in March.
Autosave and leaving safely
Charc saves every change automatically. There is no save button. The sync indicator in the top toolbar — a small dot with a label — shows the current state: saving, saved, or offline. When it says Saved, your work is in the cloud.
It’s always safe to close the tab. Come back on any device, sign in, and your manuscript is exactly where you left it.