Your first manuscript

This page walks the empty case end to end: a new project, a manuscript, a part, a chapter, a scene, and one of every Story Bible record type. Nothing between opening Sgeulai for the first time and having a working book is left to guess at.

1. Start the project

The welcome window offers New Story Bible — an empty bible and a manuscript to fill it from. Choosing it is the same as ⌘N from anywhere in the app. If the welcome window is not showing, find it again under Help ▸ Welcome to Sgeulai.

A project can hold more than one manuscript sharing one Story Bible — a trilogy, a series — but it starts with none. The next step adds the first.

2. Add a manuscript

The New Manuscript button in the binder toolbar (the document-with-a-plus icon) opens a short sheet with two starting points:

Blank manuscript — one starter chapter, "Chapter 1", ready to write into.
Book template — a structural scaffold to rename rather than build from nothing.

The New Manuscript sheet: a Manuscript section with Title and optional Subtitle fields; a Start From section offering Blank manuscript (selected) or Book template, with the note "A single empty Chapter 1. Add your own structure as you go."; a Structure section with an unset picker and the note that its beats become word and page targets once the manuscript has a length, changeable any time from Structure in the Story Bible; and Cancel and Create buttons.

Structure is optional and reversible — the note under it says so. Nothing here has to be decided now.

Either way, Create adds it to the binder immediately.

The Sgeulai window immediately after creating a blank manuscript: the binder shows the new manuscript with a single Chapter 1 beneath it and a Story Bible list where every record type reads zero except Chapter, which reads 1; the editor holds an empty Chapter 1; and the inspector says "Write at least 30 words to see readability metrics."

What a blank manuscript actually looks like. Every count is zero but one, and the inspector is waiting rather than empty.

3. Add a part

A part is not a container you create and then fill — it is a name a group of chapters share. Right-click the manuscript's title in the binder and choose Add Part…, which makes a new part with one starter chapter already in it, ready to rename. See The binder for moving existing chapters into a part instead.

A part is optional. Plenty of manuscripts are just chapters, start to finish, with no part structure at all — add one only when the book is long enough to want the grouping.

4. Add a chapter

Right-click the manuscript (or a part, to add the chapter there) and choose Add Section ▸ Chapter. The new chapter is titled "New Chapter" and lands at the end of the book — chapter numbering is fractional underneath, so inserting one between two others never renumbers the rest.

5. Add a scene

Right-click the chapter itself and choose Add Scene. A chapter is where a scene belongs, so that is where the option lives rather than in a separate menu. The new scene automatically shares the chapter's manuscript and is wired back to it — nothing further to connect by hand.

Scenes are optional too. Plenty of chapters are written straight through with no scene breaks; add them where a chapter genuinely turns a corner.

6. Add a Story Bible record

Every record type is created the same two ways, whichever type you are looking at:

From the binder sidebar — right-click a type's row under Story Bible (Character, Location, and so on) and choose New Type.
From the type's own page — open the type in the centre pane and use the New button in its toolbar, or press ⇧⌘N. An empty type's page offers the same action as its empty-state button.

Type	What you'd use it for
Character	Anyone the book has an opinion about.
Location	Places, at any scale from a room to a continent.
Event	Something that happens, with a time in the story's own terms.
Object	Things that matter: an heirloom, a weapon, a letter.
Organization	Institutions, families, factions.
Plot Item	A thread: a question raised, a gun on the mantel.
Story Arc	A change over the length of the book, broken into ordered beats.
Theme	What the book is about underneath what happens in it.
Source	Research and citations.
Note	Anything that does not fit the others.

Chapter and Scene are Story Bible types too — that is what the previous two steps actually created — which is why a scene record can hold a goal, a conflict and an outcome the same way a character record holds a fear and a wound. See The Story Bible for the full picture of what each type is for and how records connect to the prose.

If a manuscript filter is set on the type's page, a record created there is scoped to that manuscript automatically. Switch the filter to "All Manuscripts" first for a record — a recurring theme, an organization spanning a series — that should not belong to just one book.

7. Add pictures

Pictures are not a Story Bible record type — they live in their own library. Choose Pictures in the binder sidebar, then Add Pictures… in either the toolbar or the empty state, and pick image files. Dragging images straight onto the gallery works too.

Click a picture and press Space to see it full size in Quick Look, the way you would in the Finder; Space or Esc closes it. The arrow keys move the selection, left and right one picture and up and down a row, and the inspector and an open Quick Look window follow along — so one press of Space lets you walk a folder of scans, from the gallery or from the Quick Look window itself. In the search field or a caption the arrows still move the cursor. With more than one manuscript, the gallery follows the toolbar's Working on picker — see Which book the Story Bible shows.

The main window with Pictures selected in the binder. The left sidebar shows a Manuscript group above a Story Bible group listing every record type with its count, with "Pictures" highlighted in blue and carrying a count of 8. The centre pane is headed "Pictures" over the line "8 pictures", with a "Search captions, places, sources…" box and a red "+ Add Pictures…" button, and below it eight thumbnails in two rows, each labelled with its caption and the date it carries. The right-hand pane is empty: a large grey picture glyph above the heading "Pictures" and the line "Select a picture to edit its details."

The library gets a count, a search box and a browser like any binder row, and the same inspector every record type uses — which is why it is easy to mistake for a record type. The empty pane on the right is the tell: nothing to show until you pick a picture.

From here

That is the whole shape of a manuscript: parts and chapters and scenes in the binder, records in the Story Bible, pictures in their own library. Everything else in Sgeulai — linking as you write, the analysis tools, reading the manuscript with AI — works on top of this same handful of building blocks.