The story

"Where else does this word appear" and the pane's This story filter are limited to the story the note belongs to — the same thing the Creative Writer plugin calls a project. The definition is front matter, read from Obsidian's metadata cache, so the two plugins agree without depending on each other. Creative Writer does not need to be installed.

Key, in any note	Effect
writing-target: 80000 or story: true	Declares the note's folder the story. Every note under it (any depth) belongs to it.
writing-scope: note	…only that one note, not the folder.
creative-writer: false	Keeps a note out of the story — memos, research, reviews. Never searched.
creative-writer: true	Outside any project, marks a note as prose: searched along with the note itself.
creative-writer-*, creative-thesaurus-*	A note a plugin wrote for itself (log, map, history). Never searched.

A note belongs to the innermost project containing it: with Novel/Novel.md (writing-target) and Novel/Part 2/Part.md (story: true), a chapter in Part 2 belongs to Part 2.

Outside every project, the search covers the note itself plus notes marked creative-writer: true. Search in → The whole vault ignores all of this except the exclusions.