What Skarvia Is, and the One Thing It Will Not Do

A film has a script supervisor, a researcher, and a continuity editor. A publishing house has a copy editor and a fact-checker. A novelist working alone has none of them. Skarvia is built to close that gap without touching the one thing that has to stay yours.

The studio model

Most writing software is a better sheet of paper. Skarvia is built on a different premise: that what a working writer is missing is rarely the typing, and usually the department around the typing. Somebody to check whether that aircraft existed in 1961. Somebody who remembers that you gave a character green eyes four hundred pages ago. Somebody who can find the real procedure for an arraignment while you keep writing the scene.

So the product is organised as a staff. Each member reads your draft and hands back something specific: findings, contradictions, cited answers, a story bible that stays current. You remain the writer. Everyone else works for you.

The bright line

Skarvia never writes a word for you.
It reads, researches, checks, and remembers. The words stay yours.

This is a design constraint, not a marketing position, and it is enforced in the shape of the software rather than in a promise. The fact-checker, for instance, returns findings in a fixed structure: a quote, the problem, the evidence, a citation. There is no field in that structure for a suggested rewrite, and no field for praise. It is not that the checker has been asked politely to avoid writing your sentence. There is nowhere for the sentence to go.

The practical consequence: nothing you export from Skarvia contains prose that a machine wrote, because at no point was any machine given the ability to write it. If you are submitting to a publisher, a festival, or a competition with an AI disclosure policy, that distinction is the whole point.

What the staff actually does

The fact-checker. Reads a document, extracts the checkable real-world claims, and verifies each against retrieved evidence. You get a punch list with sources, or one line: "No issues found."
The Skeptic. A second reviewer whose only job is to refute each candidate finding before you ever see it. Findings that cannot survive it are discarded rather than shown, because a checker that cries wolf gets switched off by the second week.
The continuity editor. Tracks persistent details across a whole manuscript and flags contradictions as paired quotes, chapter two beside chapter fourteen. A Codex makes it sharper, because your entries become the canonical version, and it runs without one by working out the subjects from the draft itself.
The researcher. Highlight a passage, ask a question, get a cited answer filed into the project's Research library where you can find it again.
The Codex. Your story bible: characters, locations, items, factions, with aliases and custom fields. Fill it by hand, sync it free from a script's character cues and sluglines, or have it populated from a draft.

Each of these gets its own chapters later in this book. Part VI covers the staff in detail: what each one reads, what it costs against your monthly allowance, and how to read what it hands back.

What it will not do

It will not draft, continue, or rewrite your prose. There is no "write the next paragraph" button, and there is not going to be one.
It will not tell you the writing is good. The checkers report defects. They have no praise channel, which means a clean report is information rather than flattery.
It will not decide anything for you. A continuity flag is a contradiction, not a verdict about which version is correct. Deliberately changing a detail is a legitimate thing for a novel to do, and the software does not get a vote.
It will not hold your manuscript hostage. Your document lives in your own Dropbox, Google Drive, or a folder on your machine, as real files you can open without Skarvia. That is the subject of Chapter 3.

Who it is for

Skarvia handles six kinds of project, and the type you choose decides the editor, the formatting, and the exports you get:

Novel. A full word processor with book pagination.
Film / Screenplay. Industry format with true Courier pagination.
Stage play. Standard modern play layout.
Audio drama / Podcast. Scripted audio, built for the ear.
Series (episodic). Episodes under one show, sharing a single Codex, research library, and continuity.
Video script. A two-lane voiceover and visual format with running-time estimates.

Part IV covers each format properly. If you write more than one kind of thing, you can keep all of them in the same account; the studio groups projects by type.

How to read this manual

The book is written to be read in order by somebody new, and searched by somebody stuck. The contents page has a search box and an index of every term the manual covers, so if you arrived here needing one specific answer, start there and use the words you would naturally use.

If you want the whole product in a single screen instead, the help page is the summary version, and it is a better place to start when the question is "does it do X at all".

Chapters are added as Skarvia moves toward beta, so the book grows. Each one carries the date it was last updated, at the foot of the page.

Updated 2026-08-13 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?

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