Help Center
A writer's guide to the room.
Everything here is written the way we'd explain it to a friend, not a support ticket. Search below, or browse by category.
Getting Started
What is Draftroom?
Draftroom is a room for the ideas that aren't ready yet, and a separate room for the writing once they are. Glimpse Mode is where fragments land the moment they arrive — a line, a voice memo, a photo of something. Writing Mode is where you turn the glimpses you're ready for into an actual manuscript, chapter by chapter. Nothing here writes for you; every word that ends up on the page is yours.
Creating your first project
A project is the room for one piece of work — a novel, a sermon series, a collection of songs. From Home, choose "New project," give it a name, and optionally start from a template (Novel, Sermon, Poem, Song, Script, or Essay) that seeds a sensible starting structure. You can always rename chapters or add your own later — templates are a starting point, not a cage.
Understanding Glimpse Mode
Glimpse Mode is for capture, not composition. Jot a stray sentence, record a voice thought, save a photo or a link — whatever the idea arrives as. Glimpses live on a draggable Wall or in chronological Timeline view, and nothing about them expects you to finish anything right away.
Understanding Writing Mode
Writing Mode is where a project's actual manuscript lives — organized into Documents and, within each Document, reorderable Chapters. It has a distraction-light editor, autosave, a Manuscript Spine (table of contents) for jumping between chapters, and a "Lights Off" fullscreen mode for when you just want the page and nothing else.
Glimpse Mode
What is a Glimpse?
A Glimpse is the smallest unit of an idea in Draftroom — a bit of text, a voice recording, a photo, or a link. It's meant to take seconds to create, so the idea gets caught before it's gone. You can pin a Glimpse, give it a color, and come back to it whenever you're ready to develop it into real writing.
Creating and organizing ideas
Add a Glimpse from a project's Glimpses tab — choose text or voice, type or speak, and it's saved instantly. Drag Glimpses around the Wall to group related ones near each other, pin the ones you don't want to lose track of, and delete the ones that have run their course.
Glimpse Wall
The Wall is a freeform, draggable board of sticky-note-style Glimpses — closer to a corkboard than a list. Position is up to you; Draftroom remembers where you left each note.
Timeline view
Timeline shows the same Glimpses in the order you captured them, newest first. It's the better view when you want to retrace how an idea evolved, rather than where you happened to drop it on the Wall.
Voice capture
Tap the microphone in the Glimpse composer and speak — Draftroom transcribes it right there in your browser, no recording uploaded anywhere for processing. Say a phrase like "save glimpse" or "pin save" while a voice note is open and it'll save (and pin) automatically, so you don't have to touch the screen at all.
Writing Mode
Creating documents
Inside a project's Manuscript tab, choose "New document" to start a fresh manuscript. Each document holds its own set of chapters, so a single project can hold more than one manuscript — drafts of the same piece, or genuinely separate pieces, side by side.
Writing templates
When creating a project, you can start from a template — Novel, Sermon, Poem, Song, Script, or Essay — which pre-fills a sensible set of starting chapters (Plot, Characters, World, Timeline for a novel, for instance). Chapters are always freeform after that: rename, reorder, add, or delete them however the piece actually wants to grow.
Lights Off mode
Lights Off strips the writing view down to just the page — a fullscreen, distraction-light mode for when the rest of the interface is more noise than help. Toggle it from the writing toolbar; toggle it back the same way.
Writing atmosphere
Draftroom can play a soft, synthesized ambient background while you write, if that kind of low hum helps you settle in. It's entirely optional and lives in the writing toolbar alongside Lights Off.
Autosave
Everything you write in Writing Mode saves automatically as you type — word count included. There's no save button to remember, and no draft that only exists in a browser tab you might accidentally close.
Projects
Creating projects
From Home or the sidebar, choose "New project." Give it a name (the only required step) and, optionally, a starting template. Every project gets its own Glimpses, Manuscript, and Writing Dates — separate rooms for separate pieces of work.
Managing chapters
Open a project's Manuscript tab to see its Manuscript Spine — every chapter, in order, with an Open button to jump straight into writing. Drag the handle on the left of a chapter to reorder it, click a title to rename it in place, and use the delete icon to remove one you no longer need.
Moving ideas between projectsComing soon
This isn't available yet — a Glimpse currently belongs to the project it was captured in. If you need the same idea in two places for now, the workaround is re-creating it as a new Glimpse in the other project. Moving Glimpses between projects directly is on the list for a future update.
Account
Profile settings
Your Profile page (in the sidebar) lets you update your display name and profile photo. Your email address is shown there too, used for logging in.
Password resetComing soon
Self-serve password reset isn't available yet. If you're locked out of your account in the meantime, reach out through the Support page and we'll help you back in.
Privacy settingsComing soon
Dedicated privacy controls aren't built yet. In the meantime: your writing is stored to power the app itself and is never used to train any AI model, and nothing you write is read or processed by AI of any kind — Draftroom doesn't do AI writing generation. See our Privacy Policy for the full picture.
Account deletionComing soon
Self-serve account deletion isn't available yet. Contact Support and we'll take care of removing your account and its data.