Everything a novelist needs. Nothing they don't.
Quillen is a distraction-free writing app built specifically for fiction authors — manuscript editor, outlining, characters, world-building, and one-click industry-standard export, all in one place. No subscriptions, no cloud, no guesswork.
$39 once, yours forever. No subscription. Includes a 30-day free trial.
Take the guesswork out of writing.
Quillen was built by a fiction author tired of juggling a separate app for drafting, another for editing, and another for formatting — and getting lost in a maze of export options every time. Quillen formats to industry standards automatically, so you never touch a formatting menu. It bundles plotting, character building, and world-building into the same space as your manuscript, so nothing about writing a novel requires a second app. You just write.
Every book, right where you left it.
The Home screen shows every project as a cover tile on a visual bookshelf. Drag a cover to reorder the shelf into whatever order you want — no hunting through folders to remember where a project lives.
- One click into a project, or into "Edit Details" to change the title, author, or cover without opening the manuscript itself.
- Custom or auto-generated covers — upload a photo, or let Quillen generate a colourful gradient cover with the title and author rendered onto it. No project is ever stuck with a blank, ugly default tile.
- A guided, interactive product tour walks brand-new users through every major feature end-to-end, using a real bundled example book and real click-driven steps. Replay it any time from Settings.
Seven themes, switched instantly.
Quillen's own signature look, a true Dark mode, a soft Light mode, and four seasonal palettes — Winter, Summer, Autumn, and Spring. Pick whatever's easiest on your eyes for a long session, and change your mind whenever you want from Settings.
Formatting you never have to think about.
The page renders — and exports — in Times New Roman, 12pt, double-spaced, with a half-inch first-line indent, proper margins, and centered chapter headings: the format publishers and agents expect. You never touch a formatting menu; it's simply correct by default.
- Deliberately restricted rich text — Bold and Italic only, no font, size, or color controls. The manuscript can never drift into inconsistent styling.
- Chapters and Scenes in a sidebar tree — rename inline, reorder by drag-and-drop (including dragging a scene into a different chapter), add, and delete.
- One-click "Add Scene Break" splits the current chapter at the cursor, inserts a centered divider, and creates the new scene entry automatically.
- Paste sanitization strips all incoming formatting from anywhere — fonts, colors, links, tables, images — and keeps only clean plain text.
- Live word count per scene, and full undo/redo history.
Turn self-editing into something concrete.
One click highlights the current document for nine categories of common prose weaknesses, each shown as a colored underline directly in the text, plus a stats bar showing counts and percentages against a target threshold.
- Filter words — saw, heard, felt, realized, wondered — words that distance the reader from the action.
- Passive voice, vague words, and crutch words — very, really, just; that, so, then, kind of.
- Telling phrases, adverbs, and abstract words — with a curated exception list so ordinary vocabulary isn't over-flagged.
- Clichés and sentence-leading conjunctions — a curated list, plus and/but/so/yet/because/or at the start of a sentence.
It's the same engine behind our free Quillen Online Editor, built all the way into the full app.
Just the page.
One click hides the toolbar and every piece of surrounding chrome, leaving just the page.
- Typewriter scrolling keeps the current line vertically centered as you type, so your eyes and hands never have to travel down the screen.
- Paragraph dimming fades every paragraph except the one containing the cursor, visually isolating the current thought.
- A hover-to-reveal bar shows a live word count and an "Exit Focus Mode (Esc)" button — Escape always exits, even mid-keystroke.
A dictionary and a thesaurus, built in.
- Built-in spellcheck with a choice of English (US) or English (UK), switchable in Settings. Misspelled words get a red wavy underline; right-click for suggestions or "Add to Dictionary" for character names and invented words — shared across all your projects.
- The system's own spellchecker is disabled so there's never confusing double-checking. Quillen's checker is the single source of truth.
- Built-in thesaurus — right-click any word for a synonym menu organized by part of speech, sourced from a bundled offline dictionary. No internet connection required, one-click replace.
Search your whole manuscript at once.
Not just the scene you have open — every chapter and scene, searched together.
Whole-manuscript search
Results grouped by chapter and scene, with contextual snippets.
Jump to any result
Click a result to jump straight to it in the editor.
Case & whole-word toggles
Narrow results down exactly to what you mean.
Replace one or all
Swap a single match, or replace every occurrence at once.
Plan it your way, or borrow a proven shape.
A Kanban-style Board holds freeform columns you name yourself — nothing forces a three-act structure. Drag beat cards between columns, reorder within a column, or drag whole columns to rearrange.
- Four built-in structure templates — Fichtean Curve, Save the Cat, Seven-Point Story Structure, and the Hero's Journey — each with a plain-language explanation and pre-seeded columns and cards.
- Applying a template only adds content, it never overwrites anything already on your board.
- Unplaced cards sit in an "Unassigned" bucket until you decide where they go.
Structure and chronology, kept separate on purpose.
Timeline view shows the same beat cards as one straight, independently-orderable sequence. Reordering a card in Timeline doesn't affect its position on the Board, and vice versa — useful for separating "where does this scene sit structurally" from "what order do things actually happen in," especially for non-linear stories.
- Each beat card captures a one-line title, a summary, Goal / Conflict / Outcome fields, free-text notes on characters, lore, and chapters involved, and freeform tags.
- Tag filtering shows only cards matching selected tags across both Board and Timeline — useful for isolating a single character's arc or subplot within a big outline.
Every character, at a glance.
A visual character gallery shows every character as a photo card in a grid. Upload a photo per character — shown on their card and throughout their profile — and click straight into full details.
A checklist for people who feel real.
Deep, structured character profiles organized into a 9-section guided editor: Demographics, Physical Appearance, History, Psychological Traits, Communication, Strengths/Weaknesses/Abilities, Relationships, and Character Growth — dozens of specific prompts per section.
- Step-by-step edit mode, one section at a time, with Back/Next navigation.
- A read-only summary view lays out every filled-in field at a glance for quick reference while writing.
- Solves "I don't know what details to even flesh out about my characters" — a genuinely exhaustive checklist, not just a blank text box.
A home for everything about your world.
Five lore categories from one hub: Maps, World, History, Economy, and Custom.
- World and Economy entries use structured field templates based on well-known worldbuilding checklists — magic systems, social organization, currency, trade routes, taxation — solving the "what should I even be thinking about" blank-page problem.
- General lore entries get a free-form notes field plus an image gallery, autosaving as you type.
- History gets a dedicated Timeline instead of a plain list — a track label, a fuzzy or fictional display date, a numeric sort key, and separate "what actually happened" vs. "claimed / commonly believed" fields for myths and propaganda.
Generate a continent, then zoom into it.
A full embedded fantasy-map-making tool lets you procedurally generate an entire world map — continents, regions, cities, political borders — directly inside a lore entry, with autosave and an automatic snapshot thumbnail.
- Zoom out to see the whole political landscape — kingdoms, borders, coastlines, oceans.
- Zoom in to street-level detail — every town, road, and river label rendered as you get closer, not just a static image.
- Export as PNG straight into the book's Maps folder whenever you want a snapshot.
Generate a map, or bring your own.
Choose a size — Hamlet, Town, City, or Large City — give it a name and a seed, and Quillen generates street networks, buildings, walls, and water features automatically. Don't like the result? Regenerate it in one click, as many times as you want, until the settlement feels right.
Already have a map you love — hand-drawn, commissioned, or made in another tool? You're not locked into the built-in generator. Every Maps entry also accepts an uploaded image, so you can use Quillen's map-maker or your own artwork, whichever fits your project.
A place for the stuff that isn't a scene yet.
- To-Do list — a simple flat task list, outside any specific book, with title, optional due date, optional description, and a done/complete toggle. Completed items collapse into their own section.
- General notes — free-form title and text, for anything.
- Book Ideas — a lighter structured template (genre, series info, one-line premise, status like "idea / outlining / researching") — a holding pen for a concept that isn't ready to become a full project yet.
- Both views show snippet previews so you can scan your idea backlog at a glance.
No options. Just export.
One click to Word (.docx) or PDF, formatted to match the on-screen editor exactly — Times New Roman, correct spacing, first-line indents, centered scene breaks, and a page break before every chapter.
- Word export uses a real Word heading style, so chapters show up correctly in Word's own navigation pane.
- PDF export produces real, selectable, searchable text with proper pagination — not a blurry screenshot-style export.
- Any pending unsaved keystrokes are flushed to disk automatically before export, so exporting right after typing never misses the last few words.
- Upload the result straight to Kindle Create, Amazon, or an agency — there's nothing left to configure.
One purchase. No subscription.
- Every feature, forever — including future updates
- 30-day free trial (counts only days you actually use it)
- Your books live as plain files on your own computer
- Works fully offline, always — no account required
Coming soon for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
We're putting the finishing touches on Quillen. Try the free online editor in the meantime.
Not ready to wait? Try the free Quillen Online Editor in your browser.