Worldbuilding and Architecture

JustWrite has two homes for long-form planning prose that doesn’t belong to any single character, location, or object:

Architecture — three fixed documents that hold your book’s foundations.
Worldbuilding — a library of articles organised by category that you create yourself.

The difference is structural: Architecture is three permanent slots, always in the same place, always with the same names. Worldbuilding is a flexible library you fill and organise however you want.

Architecture

“I’m three chapters in and I already can’t remember what I decided about the magic system or why the protagonist is on the road. I need one place to write down the bones of this book before I forget them.”

The Architecture view (Manuscript section in the sidebar) houses three documents that every book gets. Clicking the section header in the sidebar lands you on a list of all three (Premise / Fabula / Setting) with status at a glance; click a row to edit. The detail header has an Ask the book button that opens the chat panel pre-asking about that document — useful for “summarise my premise” or “does the manuscript match the fabula I wrote here?” queries.

The three documents

Document	What goes here
Premise	What is this book about, in one paragraph? Your anchor — the sentence you come back to when the project starts to drift.
Fabula	The cause-and-effect chain of your story. The sequence of events as they happen in the world’s chronology (not necessarily the order the reader will encounter them).
Setting	World and time-period context. What kind of place is this? What technology level, what kind of magic, what social rules? This document also has an Events button that opens the world’s chronological event log.

These documents are always present — you cannot create new ones or delete them. The fixed structure is the point: every book has these three layers of planning, and they have a permanent home.

For cross-cutting decisions and project-wide reminders (“no flashbacks”, “always third-person past”, “the protagonist is never alone in a scene”), use a story-wide note in the Notes view — leave the anchor as “Story-wide” and tag it however you like.

What’s in each document

Each Architecture document has:

A fixed name — Premise, Fabula, Setting — in your interface language
A blurb — a short italic summary at the top
A status — the same project-wide palette as everything else
A rich-text body with the full editor toolbar

The Setting document also has an Events button that opens the world-level chronological event log (see Plot and time for how events work).

The Fabula and the Setting have Draft from the premise in their header: the AI drafts the document from your book’s premise — with its genre, world rules, main cast and what the document already says. The draft arrives in the editor as one change, the old text struck through and the new text marked, with Accept all / Reject all above it; nothing replaces your text until you accept. Routable as Planning → Draft from the premise in Settings → AI.

Why a writer would use it

“I closed the laptop two weeks ago mid-chapter. I can’t remember what I was building toward, and my Premise is buried somewhere in a notebook I can’t find.”

The Architecture documents are most useful before you start writing and during revision. During drafting you may not look at them for weeks at a time. That’s fine — they’re foundations, not active tools.

A common rhythm:

At the start of a project, write a paragraph in Premise so you have something to come back to.
Sketch the Fabula before you start drafting if you plan, or after the first draft if you discovery-write — either way, getting the cause-and-effect chain explicit catches plot holes.
Fill in Setting as you make worldbuilding decisions. This is the place to write “magic costs blood” or “FTL travel takes nine days” once and refer back forever.

Because these documents are reachable in two clicks from anywhere, they’re faster to consult than scrolling through a long Worldbuilding article.

Worldbuilding

The Worldbuilding view (Story world section in the sidebar) is a library of reference articles organised by category.

When to make a Worldbuilding article

“My magic system has rules, costs, a whole lineage of practitioners — none of it belongs on any character sheet, and I’ve been copy-pasting it into chapter notes every time I need to check a detail.”

A Worldbuilding article is the right home for any reference material that doesn’t belong on a character, location, or object sheet. Examples:

A magic system: rules, costs, limits, lineage
The history of a kingdom or institution
An invented language: grammar, vocabulary, dialects
A calendar system, a religion, a political structure
Mythology, prophecy texts, song lyrics, in-world documents
The economy, the technology, the medical practices

If you find yourself wanting to write about something rather than describe one specific instance of it, that’s a Worldbuilding article.

The article list

When no article is selected, you see a sortable, searchable table:

Search bar — searches title, summary, and tags.
Facet filter chips — three rows of filter buttons: Category (single-select), Status (single-select), Tags (multi-select, ANY-match). Filters combine. A “Clear filters” button resets all of them.
Sortable columns — Title (with a teaser of the summary), Category (colour-coded chip), Tags, Status (colour-coded), Words (article body word count).
Pagination — 20 rows per page by default.

The result count badge shows “N of total” so you always know how many articles your filter is showing.

The article editor

When you click into an article:

Breadcrumb showing the category, linking back to the list.
Title — inline-editable.
Status selector — same statuses as chapters and characters.
Summary — a short italic one-liner that appears in the list view’s title column.
Tag editor — multi-tag with typeahead from all tags in use across worldbuilding.
Rich-text body — the full editor toolbar (headings, bold, italic, lists, images, tables, links).
Ask the book button in the header — opens the chat panel with the question prefilled (“Tell me about {title}”) so you can interrogate the manuscript about this article without re-typing it.
Draft with AI in the header — the AI writes the article’s body from its title, its summary and your book (premise, genre, world rules, Setting, main cast), building on what the body already says. The draft arrives in the editor as one change: the old text struck through, the new text marked, with Accept all / Reject all in the bar above — nothing replaces your text until you accept. A summary gives it more to go on. Routable as Story-world sheets → Worldbuilding in Settings → AI.

How to use the category system

“I want to see every article that’s still a Draft, is tagged ‘act two’, and sits in the Politics category — all at once, without manually hunting.”

Categories pay off when you have many articles. With 5 articles you don’t need them; with 50 you can’t navigate without them.

A useful first split is Setting, Magic, Politics, History, Culture, Other. You can refine from there. Each category gets an icon and a colour so the sidebar tree stays readable even with dozens of articles.

The combination of categories + tags + status gives you three independent ways to slice: “show me all draft-status magic articles tagged ‘act three’.” That kind of cross-cut is the reason both systems exist.

Status on articles

Worldbuilding articles use the same status palette as chapters and characters — Draft, Revise, Done, To-do. Use it to track which articles are written, which need more research, and which are still placeholders.

Worldbuilding vs. Architecture — which to use

Situation	Use
One-paragraph premise of the book	Architecture → Premise
Full chronological plot of the book	Architecture → Fabula
Single document about the world’s overall context	Architecture → Setting
Cross-cutting rules (“always third person”, “no flashbacks”)	Notes (story-wide, no anchor)
Deep article on a single worldbuilding topic	Worldbuilding article
A category of articles (magic system, politics, religion)	Worldbuilding with its own category
Notes specific to one character	Character → Backstory
Notes specific to one location	Location → Description

In short: Architecture is the foundation (three slots, always there). Worldbuilding is the library (many articles, organised by category). Character/Location/Object descriptions are for what belongs to one specific entity.

A worked example

You’re writing a fantasy novel.

Premise — “A young cartographer must finish her dead father’s atlas while a foreign empire moves to invade the territory it describes.” One paragraph. Anchors everything.
Fabula — A bullet list of events in story-world chronological order: the invasion’s preparation, the father’s death, the daughter’s discovery of the partial atlas, etc.
Setting — Two paragraphs on the world: continent, technology level (early industrial), magic (cartomancy — maps have power), the political landscape.
Notes → story-wide — “Third-person past, single POV. The atlas is described in the present tense when quoted. Chapter titles are locations on the map.”
Worldbuilding → Magic → “Cartomancy” — a long article on how map-magic works. Rules, limits, costs, training, lineage. Status: Draft.
Worldbuilding → Politics → “The Heliad Empire” — an article on the invading power. History, structure, ambition. Status: Done.
Worldbuilding → History → “The Long Peace” — the 70 years before the novel begins. Status: To-do.

Each of these has a clear home. None of it would have fit in a Character or Location sheet — it’s all about systems, not individuals.