Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I want to experiment with LLM assisted story writing and given how many folks here are LLM advocates, maybe someone can help me there. My main problem is that I absolutely suck at writing, so I need something that takes character, setting and (detailed) plot point descriptions for a scene and can expand that to text using my chosen LLM model (via any OpenAI api compatible provider).
More specifically, I want a free local app (preferably native Windows but a local webui will do in a pinch) that lets me write the overall style guide, character / setting notes, "previously
on Buffy the Vampire Slayerin the last chapter" condensed history notes and then the notes for the scene (and the beginning of the next scene to help flow). The scene notes would be a combination of "A does X, B mentions Y" and occasional inserted sentences like "The silence was interrupted by a doorbell ring" (that are more ideas for the LLM and don't need to be preserved as-is). It should let me generate multiple variations, manually edit the previous prompts and generated results for continuation and crucially never delete unused generations so I can later steal sentences and ideas from them (but I don't need explicit branching from every response).Does something that does all this exist as a local app? And one that has a usable UI without ridiculously small text and non-existent contrast?
I'll give some caveats right away: don't expect miracles in terms of prose quality, interesting plots, or coherency of metaphor. This is a moderately useful way to get a story framework without getting stuck on the rough spots, but you're going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting to get it into a state that's enjoyable even for you to read, and a lot of people will bounce off it no matter how aggressively you edit.
There's a few different approaches. But only a few have good UI, and only a few reliably maintain unused generations, and there's not a ton of overlap.
Most of the standard webuis or desktop ui chatbot implementations do implement what you want, just poorly. LMStudio's probably the best from an organizational perspective, since it supports simple drag-and-drop separate folders and subfolders. Biggest downside's just that it seems pretty abandoned and the company's pivoted to their agentic Bionic tool. Llama.cpp and Unsloth Studio support forking conversations, editing past prompts (or regenerating an answer to an existing prompt, and then switching back and forth from previous versions. They just suck at it, and it's really easy to lose past information if you aren't fastidious about labeling and forking, and even then it gets really messy. Get used to exporting old runs to JSON and sorting them into folders on disk, or you'll go nuts. I will caution that a lot of these want to provide their own endpoint, rather than interface with someone else's, though. Still, it might well be the easiest and most straightforward way to test out if that's actually helpful.
For an example of that approach with prompt-and-response, see here, Muse-Glimmer (imo, not great) or here, Qwen3.8 (almost passable, but definitely not what I was aiming for) (cw: Monty-Python-esque comedic gore, ARK fanfiction). You really don't need much in the way of fancy formatting for individual scenes or five-to-six scene series. For longer series, asking for an outline first, then prompting individual scenes (or parts-of-scenes) from the outline will let you expand into the mid-thirty scenes before it starts to get janky and around sixty scenes before the context starts going loopy.
There's a few dedicated writing tools. Unfortunately, they fail your crucial requirement: they technically support branching, but barely, and they don't enforce it. Just will list them so you know about them. SillyTavern is the roleplay power-user tool. Its support for flicking back and forth from past prompt edits is less good and the UI is a real pain to learn, but it has extremely strong tools for separating characters, worlds, lore, and actual prompts. I will admit I don't have too much experience with it, but I do give it props for not bundling in the inference engine. KoboldCPP is more writing-focused, but takes a similar approach. People tend to be happier about the user-interface, less happy about the inference engine (unfortunately, baked-in hard).
Agentic approaches are more complicated. I've been messing with an agent layout for Claude Code/pi-agent/whatever, and it's powerful, but it's also completely incompatible with the 'preserve past attempts' version. You can tell it to do so, and it might even try for a while, but then it'll just randomly ask for permission to rewrite a file or delete a directory, and it'll usually have good reasons, but it's a pain, and if you bulk-granted edit permissions then you're just out of luck. Maybe some agent framework will have better ways to set up and coerce permissions, but I think it's a dead end for writing prose, specifically. Still need to try out some of the more specialized stuff, just not optimistic.
I've started work on a procedural Java app that might be closer to what you're looking for, and very specifically targeted at writing short stories or novellas, but it's really ugly slop code and barely above a python script right now. If you aren't able to find something in the next week that you like, I'll see if I can get this into a better form.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link