Editor Basics: Formatting, Scene Breaks, and Indentation

Every card in Storynote opens into a rich text editor built for prose. It stays out of your way while you draft and gives you the formatting fiction actually needs, without the clutter of a full word processor. This guide covers the essentials so you can write comfortably from your first session.

Formatting your text

The editor supports the standard formatting you expect: bold, italic, and the structural elements like headings and lists that help you organize a card. Apply formatting from the toolbar or with familiar keyboard shortcuts as you type.

Keep formatting purposeful. In prose cards, italics for emphasis and the occasional heading to mark a section are usually all you need. Heavy formatting tends to get in the way of reading your own draft.

Scene breaks

Fiction needs a clean way to mark a shift in time or point of view within a chapter. The editor provides a dedicated scene break for exactly this. Insert one where a scene ends and another begins, and you get a clear visual divider instead of improvising with blank lines or rows of asterisks.

Scene breaks are a real element in the document, not just whitespace, so they stay consistent and survive export. Use them to keep long chapters readable and to signal transitions to anyone reading your draft.

Paragraph indentation

Manuscripts often call for first line indentation rather than blank lines between paragraphs. The editor supports proper paragraph indentation so your draft can match standard manuscript style. Choose the look that fits your workflow and keep it consistent across your chapters.

Saving your work

You never press save. The editor autosaves as you write, batching your changes and flushing them in the background. If you navigate away, close the tab, or lose your connection briefly, your work is captured. For more on how this works and what to do if something looks unsaved, see why your changes are safe: autosave explained.

To build structure around your writing, see organizing your story with cards. To clean up your prose, see grammar checking in Storynote.