Quillhollow

Quillhollow is a desktop workshop for novelists who want to plan, write, and finish a manuscript without fighting their tools.

It is data-driven and deeply interconnected: every character, place, plot thread, and scene is a card, and those cards link to one another so your story's web is always one click away. Everything runs on your own machine. No AI features. No accounts. No data collection. No subscription. And when you want to write away from your desk, a free Android companion comes with you.

Try it with a real book first. Every copy of Quillhollow includes a complete sample project: the full text of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, already organized into scenes, characters, locations, and plot threads. Explore every view and tool with a finished novel before you write a word of your own.

Four ways to see your story

• Write is a calm, focused editor for the work that matters. Compose scene by scene with a live word count, a distraction-free focus mode, inline comments, and beats you can drop straight into the prose. Track each scene from first sketch to final polish.
• Plan is a freeform visual canvas. Place cards, notes, and labels anywhere, draw connections between them, and arrange your story the way it lives in your head, not in a rigid template.
• Outline shows your whole book at a glance: a timeline of acts, chapters, and scenes with thread lines that trace each character, plotline, and theme across the story, plus pacing bars that reveal where a thread goes quiet.
• Export turns your draft into a clean Word document in standard manuscript format. A live preview shows what to expect, down to the title page, headings, and scene breaks.

Tools that keep you connected

• Cards are the heart of Quillhollow. Characters, locations, plot threads, themes, and world-building all live as cards you can tag, link, color, and cross-reference. Change something once and every connected view reflects it.
• World links your books into a shared series, so characters, places, and lore stay consistent across every volume while each book keeps its own structure.
• Snapshots let you write fearlessly. Quillhollow autosaves as you go, keeps layered backups, and takes named snapshots of the entire project so you can always return to an earlier draft.
• Search finds any line instantly. One search reaches across the prose of every scene and its beats.

Write anywhere

The free Android companion takes your manuscript with you. Read your whole project and edit scenes on your phone, synced through your own cloud folder. No server, no account, no extra cost.

Make it yours

Quillhollow adapts to you. Start from a built-in theme or build your own: set your interface colors, choose the fonts and text styles for your headings and body text, and save presets you can switch between. Dark mode is included.

Your words stay yours

Quillhollow stores everything as plain files on your own computer. It never phones home, never asks you to sign in, and has no AI features of any kind. Buy it once, and it is yours.

No AI

Quillhollow has no AI features and never touches your writing with AI. The one exception inside the product, disclosed in full: the Quillhollow-specific data in the included sample project (its character, place, and plot cards) was AI-generated to show the app in action. The story text itself is Dickens' public-domain original.