Eight Editors, Zero Writers: Why I'm Building Scriptorium
I've finished books but never sent the fiction to agents — never felt it was ready. Twenty years later, I'm building the tool I wish I'd had: not an AI that writes for you, but one that reads like a professional editor.
In 2016, Brandon Sanderson signed my copy of The Way of Kings. He wrote two words on the title page: Keep Writing.
I’d started my first novel at sixteen. Finished books since then — self-published a short nonfiction piece, but the fiction? Never sent to agents. Never felt it was ready. I knew something was missing, but I couldn’t name it. Met Sanderson ten years later. Now another ten years have passed. I’ve written less and less — but I’ve read voraciously, and spent the last decade (a bit more, actually) building software systems for a living. At some point the two threads had to cross.
This is the story of that crossing.
The generation problem
Driven by curiosity more so than expectations, I’ve tried generating fiction with large language models. Poetry, short stories, chapters of a novel. I’ve tried it with every frontier model I could get my hands on. The results are — and I want to be fair here, because this is subjective — mixed at best.
Nonfiction comes out passable. Prose fiction lands somewhere between competent and soulless. Poetry is where the mask slips entirely. The rhythm is wrong. The images are borrowed. The voice is nobody’s.
You can feel it. Jason Fried put it well: AI writes in brown. Combine all the colours and you get brown. Combine all the writing styles and you get brown writing. A generated paragraph reads like a summary of what a paragraph should do, not the paragraph itself. It hits every beat and misses the music.
This isn’t a permanent limitation. Models will probably improve. But the fundamental tension remains: if the machine writes it, it’s not yours. And for most writers, the writing is the point. The struggle with a sentence, the surprise when a character does something you didn’t plan — that’s not overhead to be optimised away. That’s the work.
I picked the Synthesis ending in Mass Effect 3, and we all saw what happened in Battlestar Galactica. I’m a believer in augmentation, not replacement.
What editors actually do
Here’s the thing about professional editors: they don’t write your book. A good developmental editor reads your manuscript and tells you that your protagonist’s decision in Chapter 12 reverses without the internal conflict that would make it earned. That the setup in Chapter 4 promises consequences you haven’t delivered. That your dialogue is doing exposition’s job in every scene with the antagonist.
They diagnose. They don’t prescribe — or at least, the best ones don’t. They hold up a mirror and say: here’s what I see. The writing stays yours.
Getting access to that kind of feedback is extraordinarily difficult. Literary agents are gatekeepers by necessity. Publishers work with writers who are already signed. Freelance developmental editors charge four figures per manuscript (as the good ones should). For most writers, expert editorial feedback arrives at the end of the process, if it arrives at all.
What if it could arrive during the process?
Eight minds, one manuscript
Scriptorium has eight editorial agents. Each reads your fiction through a different lens:
Structure looks at plot logic — stakes, setup, payoff, whether promises made early are kept later. Character tracks motivation, arc, and consistency — does this person behave like the person you’ve built? Dialogue listens for voice distinction and subtext — can you tell your characters apart with the names removed? Theme watches for patterns and resonance — what your story is about beneath what happens.
Pacing asks whether every scene earns its place and whether momentum is building or stalling. World checks consistency against your own world-building notes — the rules you set, not rules it invents. Prose reads for rhythm and clarity at the sentence level. Style compares your current writing against your voice profile — a calibration of how you write, not how writing should sound.
They diagnose. They don’t rewrite your prose. Not unless you explicitly ask — and even then, they confirm first. The default mode is always “here’s what I notice”.
The first time I ran Structure against my own manuscript, it flagged a promise I’d set up in the opening chapter and never paid off. I’d read that chapter forty times. Knew it by heart. Didn’t see it. That was the moment I understood what this tool could be — not a replacement for the editorial eye, but a way to have one in the room while you’re still writing.
Twenty years of notes
That thing I couldn’t name — the gap between finishing a manuscript and feeling it was ready — I’d been trying to close it the only way I knew how: by reading. Reading and re-reading. Noting patterns, structure, turns of phrase. How magic systems constrain story. How character arcs mirror and subvert each other. Where thematic depth comes from and why some novels reward a second reading while others don’t survive one.
Twenty years of that. Notes from craft books. Observations from every story - be it novel, film, anime. Things I underlined in novels that did something I couldn’t explain at the time. An average of a few hundred pages a week for a decade.
Every agent in Scriptorium is grounded in that knowledge base. The agents run on multiple providers — including fine-tuned models on the higher tiers — and every one of them is shaped by a body of accumulated knowledge about what makes fiction work. Not generic writing advice. The kind of editorial intelligence that comes from years of reading deeply and thinking about why certain pages make you hold your breath.
No lock-in
I built Scriptorium out of frustration with tools that do their utmost to keep you inside them. Every writing app wants to be your entire workflow — and then makes it painful to leave.
Scriptorium won’t lock you in. Import from Markdown, Word, RTF, PDF, even Scrivener projects. Export submission-ready manuscripts in any format. Your words are yours. If you find a better tool tomorrow, take everything with you.
When pricing goes live, it will reflect real costs honestly — editorial-depth inference isn’t cheap. But there will be a free tier writers can actually use, and no features locked behind a paywall. Just more room.
The security question
Writers are rightly paranoid about their unpublished work. I am too. So every word in Scriptorium is encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, keys stored separately from data, and — because I spent the last year building systems in regulated finance where “good enough” isn’t — ML-KEM-768 post-quantum cryptography from day one.
Your manuscripts are encrypted at rest and in transit. Content is decrypted only in memory during analysis, never stored as plaintext, never logged. A database breach yields nothing but encrypted blobs.
One user
Scriptorium has one user today: me. It’s a passion project. I built it for myself — a writer who never quite kept at it, despite Brandon Sanderson’s best efforts, and an engineer who’s spent the last few years at the very edge of what AI agents can do.
I’ve been thinking about something like this since language models started getting interesting. But it wasn’t until I experienced the transition from chat-and-prompt to agentic workflows — and hit the real limitations of language models in multiple fields — that I understood what to build, how to build it, and most importantly, why.
Writing helps me think about the world. It always has. Scriptorium reflects what I think a writer needs — no more, no less. It will evolve.
Getting an agent, signing with a publisher, working with a professional editor — these are extraordinarily hard things to achieve. Scriptorium can’t promise any of it. But we’ll try to make the journey easier, the dream bigger, and the doubts smaller.
Keep Writing.
Scriptorium is still in development. If you'd like to follow along or try it when it's ready, get in touch.