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How an AI writes formatting into your scenes

What this is for

When an AI reads or writes a scene through Write's connector, it doesn't see buttons and menus; it sees the scene as plain text with a few light marks for the things a page can do—italics, a scene break, a centred line, a picture, a text-message exchange. Write calls this the text form. You don't have to learn it to work with an AI: the AI already knows it, and whatever it sends arrives in the editor as ordinary formatted prose. This page is here so you can recognise what you're looking at if an AI shows you a draft, and so you can ask for things by name.

The marks

Paragraphs are separated by a blank line. Two blank lines in a row keep one empty paragraph—a line of air, the kind you'd leave under a point-of-view name at the top of a scene.

  • *emphasis* is italic, **strong** is bold, and ***both*** is both.
  • ^words^ set those words in the book's alternate body face—the second font from your page setup, for a sign, a note, or a line the story says is in another hand.
  • A line of * * * on its own is a scene break.
  • A backslash at the end of a line breaks the line inside a paragraph (what Shift+Enter does in the editor).
  • -> THE END <- is a centred paragraph with no indent.
  • > text is a paragraph indented from the left, for a letter or a quotation; > text < is indented on both sides; - text is a hanging indent, first line flush and the rest in, for a list of names or an appendix entry.
  • [text](https://…) is a link.

A paragraph that happens to begin with one of those marks is written with a backslash first, and a literal asterisk or caret is \* or \^.

Pictures

An image insert is a line of its own: ![caption](image:<id> lines=6 top bleed). The id is one of the book's pictures—an AI gets the list from the media library—lines is how tall it prints in lines of your leading, top or bottom pins it to that edge of the page it lands on, and bleed runs it to the edge of the sheet. The caption may be empty.

Text-message exchanges

An exchange is fenced, one message per line, the sender before a colon:

[chat: Desh | style: phone]
me: Where are you?
Desh: Docking bay four. *Hurry.*

me: Two minutes. Stall them.
[/chat]
  • me is the character whose phone the reader is looking at—their bubbles sit on the right, unnamed. Anyone else sits on the left, and is named above their bubbles when there's more than one of them.
  • The header names who the exchange is with, shown above it; [chat] alone means no header.
  • style: is phone, terminal, holo or paper (torn paper). Left out, the exchange follows the book's default from Chapter header setup, where the colours by person live too.
  • A blank line between two messages is a pause—time passed before the next one was sent.
  • A message's text takes the marks above, and a backslash at the end of a line breaks the line inside one bubble.

Once it's in the editor, the exchange is the same one you'd have made by hand, and everything on Put a text-message exchange in a scene applies—renaming a person, pauses, colours.

What comes back

The text form reads back exactly as it went in: an AI that reads your scene sees your italics, your breaks and your exchanges, and a scene that goes out and comes back unchanged is unchanged. And as everywhere else, an AI's changes to a scene that already has words arrive as suggestions for you to accept or reject, not as edits made behind your back.

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