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The Story Atlas is what makes the rest of Quarkle smarter: Chat draws on it broadly, the Highlight Bar reads your book notes and current chapter summary, the Review Room pulls character profiles. Reports are the exception: they read your prose directly. This guide is the practical layer on top of the reference pages: how to use the Atlas well once you know it exists.

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Overview

The Story Atlas file tree with System notes and auto-discovered Character and World notes

The Story Atlas: System files, per-chapter summaries and notes, and auto-discovered characters and world.

Three things are worth mastering: knowing which note to write to, curating what Quarkle builds for you, and locking down what’s final.

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Know which note to write to

Quarkle gives you three places to put standing information, each scoped differently.
The Memory note with a few author preferences

The Memory note: standing instructions Quarkle carries into every chat.

  • Memory (Your preferences) is about you: how you want Quarkle to write and behave. Not the story itself.
  • Book Notes is book-wide direction: setting, arc, themes, anything true of the whole manuscript.
  • Chapter Notes is ephemeral, scoped to one chapter: beats to hit, a character’s mindset here, a tone override.
A Chapter Notes entry with working instructions for a character's mindset and tone in a chapter

A Chapter Note: working instructions for one chapter, cleared once they land in the prose.

All three get written as you chat, the same way, and you can edit any of them directly. Full breakdown with a decision rule: Memory, Book Notes, and Chapter Notes.

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Let Quarkle build your world, then curate it

You don’t have to set characters or world entries up. Quarkle finds them as you write and builds profiles from what’s on the page.
An AI-written character profile note for Mara

A character profile Quarkle wrote from the manuscript: role, family, personality, arc, and relationships.

Your job is to curate, not author from scratch. Open a note Quarkle wrote and correct anything it got wrong, add detail it couldn’t infer (a backstory beat you haven’t put on the page yet), or reorganize it to match how you think about the character.
A character note in edit mode with a formatting toolbar

Editing a note. Change anything Quarkle wrote, or add your own details.

Read a new character or world note the first time Quarkle writes it, not weeks later. Catching a wrong inference early means it doesn’t quietly propagate into a dozen future comments and rewrites that assume it’s true.

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Freeze finished notes

Once you’ve nailed down a character’s voice or a rule of your world, freeze the note. Quarkle will read it forever but never write to it again.
A character note showing a Frozen state with a closed padlock icon and confirmation toast

A frozen note: Quarkle can read it, but the padlock means it will never edit it.

Click the padlock icon on any note to freeze it. It’s the single highest-leverage habit for keeping a long manuscript’s canon stable: freeze a fact once it’s right, and every future chapter builds on it instead of a moving target.

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Track every change

Every note, System file or custom, keeps a full history. The Activity tab shows a timeline of every change across the whole Atlas.
The Atlas Activity revision timeline

Activity: every change to your Atlas, newest first, with the author and the size of each change.

Open any entry for a word-level diff of exactly what changed.
A word-level diff of a note revision, with deleted and added counts

A revision opened to its word-level diff.

If a note ever drifts somewhere you don’t want, you’re never stuck. Open its history, find the version before the drift, and restore it, the same non-destructive restore used everywhere else in Quarkle. See Undoing a Bad Edit.

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Organize your own notes

Beyond what Quarkle builds automatically, add your own notes and folders for anything that doesn’t fit a character or world entry: a running list of open plot threads, research you’re drawing on, a glossary of names and terminology. These live in the Atlas alongside everything else, with the same editing, freezing, and history.

Next: Importing a Manuscript

Bring in an existing draft and get the Atlas caught up on it.