Getting started

Creative Writer is a desktop Obsidian plugin (minAppVersion 1.7.2). It works in editing mode — Source and Live Preview. Reading view has no editor underneath, so the editor features do not apply there; the panels (writing desk, writer board, story map, plot grid, story threads, manuscript) work everywhere.

Install

From the community list

Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search Creative Writer → Install → Enable.

From a release

1. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Put them in <your vault>/.obsidian/plugins/creative-writer/.
3. Reload Obsidian (Ctrl/Cmd + R) and enable the plugin under Settings → Community plugins.

From source

git clone https://github.com/amancioandre/creative-writer
cd creative-writer
npm install
npm run build                                  # typecheck + bundle → main.js
npm run install:vault -- /path/to/your/vault   # copies the three files into the vault

Then reload Obsidian and enable the plugin.

The first five minutes

1. Open any note and start writing. By default the plugin runs everywhere: the current line has a faint band behind it, the rest of the page fades with distance, each sentence in your paragraph sits on a faint rhythm tint, and a cliché or a passive gets a stronger one. Hover a tint for the note. The style checks are one lens; the status bar names the lens that is on, and a click on it offers the others: dialogue, your own overused words, a character's accent.
2. Toggle Zen Mode (command palette → Toggle Zen Mode). Ribbon, tabs, sidebars and status bar go; the page stays. Toggle again to come back.
3. Open the writing desk (click the readability label in the status bar, or the command). You will see today's words, your streak, the note's reading-ease band and its scenes.
4. Declare a project. Add writing-target: 50000 to the front matter of a note; its folder is now a project with a pace line in the desk, and a story map. See Projects.
5. Open the story map from the ribbon (the fork icon). Your characters and places appear once they have notes — or once names recur enough in the prose. See Story map and Structuring a project.
6. Open the plot grid from the ribbon (the table icon). Every scene is a row; add a ## heading to Story threads.md, or a column from the grid's side column, and type into a cell what that thread is doing in the scene. See Plot grid.

Turning things off

Every feature has a toggle in Settings → Creative Writer. The master switch, Enabled, and the Toggle everywhere command stop all editor features at once. To keep the plugin out of one note, add creative-writer: false to its front matter; to run it only in some folders, see Where it runs.

Optional: a local model

None of the above needs a model. If you want the model assistant, myth reports, the story map's relationship reading, the threads' fact reading or the plot grid's readings, install Ollama, pull a chat model (ollama pull qwen2.5:7b to start; deepseek-r1:14b reads myth and relationships noticeably better), and set Settings → Model assistant → Model to Local (Ollama). Everything stays on your machine. See Model assistant.

Optional: Harper

Creative Writer deliberately does not check spelling, grammar, punctuation or filler words. Harper does, offline, and the two are designed to run together. See Harper companion.