Your First Project and Your First Document

This chapter takes you from a new account to a page you can type on, and explains the two decisions you make on the way that are annoying to change later: the project type, and where the document lives.

Creating an account

Sign up at skarvia.com/signup with an email address and a password of at least eight characters. Two things to know before you start:

Use an address you can actually receive mail at. A verification email goes out the moment the account is created, and disposable-address services are refused at the form. If you lose your password later, the reset link is sent to that same address.
Signup is capped during the founding beta. Seats are numbered and finite. If they are all taken when you arrive, you get the waitlist rather than an error, and the seat count on that page is live.

You are signed in as soon as the account exists, and you land in the Studio. Your account is not empty: signup creates a project called My first project, a novel, containing one document called Chapter one. Rename both, change the project type by making a new one, or ignore them entirely and start your own.

The studio lives at /app, and the "Open the studio" button in the top bar goes there from anywhere on the site.

The Studio page

The Studio is your shelf. It lists every project you own, grouped by type, so novels sit with novels and scripts with scripts. Two things appear below that list when they apply:

Shared with you, listing documents other writers have invited you into, with the role you hold on each one. Those are covered in Part VII.
New project, the form that creates the next one.

Starting a project

The New project form has two fields and a button:

Title. A working title is fine. It is not the title on your manuscript's title page, which is set separately, and renaming a project later does not disturb anything inside it.
Type. This is the decision worth thinking about for a moment. See below.
Create opens the new project's binder.

Choosing the type

The type decides which editor you get, how the pages are laid out and counted, and which exports are offered. Pick the one that matches what you are actually writing:

Type	What you get
Novel	A full word processor: styles, lists, tables, footnotes, images, page breaks, and pages that paginate like a book.
Film / Screenplay	Industry screenplay format. Tab and Enter cycle element types, sluglines auto-form, and the page count is Courier-true.
Stage play	Standard modern stage-play layout: centred character cues, italic stage directions, acts and scenes.
Audio drama / Podcast	Scripted audio layout, built around narration, character cues, and sound.
Series (episodic)	A show rather than a file: episodes live under one project and share a single Codex, research library, and continuity.
Video script	A two-lane voiceover and visual format with a running-time estimate.

If you are writing a television or streaming series, choose Series rather than making one screenplay project per episode. Sharing one world across episodes is the entire advantage, and rebuilding a Codex nine times is the thing it saves you from.

The type is fixed once the project is created. There is no setting that converts a novel into a screenplay, because the two store fundamentally different documents. If you picked the wrong one, the cheapest fix is to notice early: create the right project and start again while "again" is still one scene. Your text is never stranded, since you can export from one and import into the other (Part VIII), but the formatting will not survive the trip intact.

Inside a project: the binder

A project opens as a binder: your documents in your order, with the project's shared tools alongside them. The binder is where you control structure.

↑ and ↓ reorder documents.
⇄ moves a document into a part or a season.
The new part / folder form starts a group, so a novel can have parts and a series can have seasons.
Your cloud folders mirror this structure, so the shape you build here is the shape you see in Dropbox or Drive.

The project also carries four things that belong to the whole project rather than to any one document, each with its own chapters in Part V:

Codex, the story bible: characters, locations, items, factions.
Outline board, for structure and beats.
Research library, where cited answers are filed.
Lookbook, which turns Codex characters and locations into visual boards.

Your first document

Create a document in the binder and it opens in the editor for its project type. Start typing immediately; nothing has to be configured first.

The first time a document saves, Skarvia asks one question: where should this document live? Your options are Dropbox, Google Drive, or a folder on this computer. This is not a preference dialog you can safely dismiss forever. It is the storage model, and it is the reason your manuscript is not trapped in this application. Chapter 3 covers it in full, including the browser rule about Desktop and Documents folders that catches most people out on their first attempt.

You can answer "Not now" and keep writing. Skarvia holds a working copy either way, and the storage button in the status bar reopens the question whenever you are ready.

The tour, and the feedback button

The first time you open the Studio, and the first time you open the editor, a short tour points out the essentials. Skip it whenever you like; it does not come back.

The ✎ Feedback button sits at the bottom right of every page. It reaches the people building Skarvia directly, and during the run-up to beta it is the fastest route to getting something fixed or getting a chapter of this manual written. Bugs, ideas, and stray thoughts all go to the same place, and all of it is read.

Updated 2026-08-12 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?

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