Help
Short, plain answers for the parts of the app that trip people up most: Story, Draft, Tandem, AI tools, story layers, notes, sync, plans, and recovery.
Each section stands on its own, so jump to whatever you came for. If you are new, start with the first two: Story, Draft, Tandem, and AI boundaries explain the ideas that make the rest of the app click.
Understand the app
Skeleton Draft has three working surfaces, and they do different jobs.
Story is the structural treatment built from your project, acts, chapters, scenes, cards, and storypads.
Draft is where you write the rough material itself. Format cleans that material into prose or Fountain, depending on the project.
Tandem puts Story and Draft beside each other so the structure stays visible while you write.
AI in Skeleton Draft is optional, narrow, and deliberate.
There is no chat assistant. The AI tools are bounded one-click actions: Distill, Refine, Seed, Render, and Format. They only work on text you choose.
Distill writes a logline. Refine shapes a storypad into cleaner synopsis prose. Seed fills the next layer of child loglines. Render builds the Story treatment. Format cleans the Draft into prose or screenplay format.
The hard line: the tools do not invent, add, or rewrite the story. Dialogue stays verbatim. Originals are preserved in version history so every AI pass is reversible.
The hard line: Skeleton Draft will never train AI on your writing.
Skeleton Draft organizes work by altitude: project, acts, chapters, and scenes.
Read top to bottom, each layer is a finer grain of the same story. The project is the whole work. Acts are its largest movements. Chapters group scenes into readable units. Scenes are where things actually happen.
You do not have to use every layer the same way on every project. A feature might use the full act, chapter, scene stack; a short can stay compact; a series can use the structure at whatever level keeps the throughline clear.
The layer buttons just change your view. They switch the board without touching the story underneath: same project, different altitude.
Notes hold everything that does not belong in the main structure yet: research, fragments, character thoughts, reminders, theme scraps, stray images, lines you do not want to lose.
Stack them, tag them, search them, and move them as the project shifts. Tags are the part worth a little discipline: a few consistent ones, like a character name, a theme, or a thread, turn a pile of notes into something you can actually pull from later. The point is to catch loose material before it gets lost, so when the right scene finally arrives, the raw material is already waiting.
Account, billing, and recovery
When you are signed in, Skeleton Draft syncs your project data to your account, so your work follows you instead of living on one device. Local browser data is still handled carefully, and exports are part of the preservation plan.
Use export and backups whenever you want a portable copy you control: before a big revision, at a milestone, or just on a schedule that lets you sleep. The goal is plain: your work should never be trapped in one place, one browser, or one account.
Free is the full structure tool for three projects: cloud sync, acts, chapters, scenes, notes, backups, exports, and 100 lifetime AI actions.
Pro is everything: unlimited projects, version history, Distill, Refine, Seed, Render, Format, and optional bring-your-own OpenAI or Anthropic key.
You can try Pro free for 14 days with a card on file. Cancel before it ends if it is not for you.
App looks stale after an update? Hard refresh the page, then reopen the app. That reloads the app without touching your work. If it still looks wrong, export a backup first, then contact support before clearing any browser data. Do not clear cookies or site data for Skeleton Draft unless you have an export in hand.
Sign-in redirect acting strange? Once sign-in finishes and you are back on Skeleton Draft, use the Open App link.
A project looks missing? Check the project dropdown first, then your backups and export files. Missing usually means out of view, not gone.
Account or billing problem? Head to the contact page with your account email and a note on what you are seeing.
Still stuck? Contact Skeleton Draft.
