Why I Built Rule of Words

The frustration that started it

I have been writing for over twenty-five years. Technology journalism, crime fiction, poetry, the occasional football match report. In all that time, I have tried every writing tool going. Word. Scrivener. Google Docs. Notion. Ulysses. Bear. iA Writer. Specialist novel software, generic note-taking apps, and more plain text files than I care to remember.

None of them worked the way I think about a novel.

The problem with existing tools

Word processors treat a novel like a long document. They do not understand that Chapter 8 has three scenes, that the protagonist is in a different emotional state in each one, or that the subplot you planted in Chapter 3 still needs resolving.

Scrivener understands structure, and I used it for years. But it feels like software designed in 2010, because it was. It runs on your desktop, your files live on your hard drive, and syncing between devices is an exercise in faith. The character sheets are flat text fields. There is no awareness of how a character changes through the story.

The newer AI writing tools have a different problem. They want to generate your novel for you. Feed in a prompt, get a chapter back. That is not writing - it is delegating. And the output reads like it was delegated, because it was.

What I actually wanted

I wanted a tool that understood structure the way I do: chapters containing scenes, characters who evolve, plot threads that need tracking, and a timeline that shows me the shape of the whole manuscript.

I wanted character profiles that went beyond a name and a description - profiles with fears, desires, speech patterns, internal contradictions, and an arc that tracks from who they are at the start to who they become by the end.

I wanted to know, at any point in the manuscript, exactly what state each character was in. Not who they are in general, but who they are right now, in this scene, given everything that has happened to them so far.

And if I was going to use AI - and I was curious about it - I wanted it to act like a knowledgeable editor, not a ghostwriter. I wanted it to read my work and tell me where the tension drops, where the dialogue is on the nose, where I am telling instead of showing. I did not want it to write my scenes for me.

Building it

I am a web developer by trade. I run Wiredcoyote Digital, building Laravel applications and WordPress plugins. So I built what I wanted.

Rule of Words is a Laravel 12 application. The editor uses TipTap, which gives me ProseMirror under the hood - the same foundation that powers many professional editors. The AI is powered by Anthropic's Claude, which I chose after testing every major model specifically on creative writing tasks. Claude understands subtext, voice, and narrative structure in a way that other models do not.

The character progression system is the feature I am most proud of. Every character can have progression entries linked to specific scenes, recording changes in their emotional state, knowledge, physical condition, relationships, skills, or beliefs. When the AI assistant works on a scene, it only sees progressions from that point in the manuscript and earlier. It always has the right version of the character.

The AI philosophy

The AI assistant is optional. You can subscribe to Rule of Words and never touch it. The Author plan at $15 per month gives you every structural and editing tool without any AI involvement.

If you do use the AI, it does not write for you. It reads your work in context - knowing your genre, your POV, your tense, your characters and their current states, your locations, your story arcs - and gives you specific, relevant feedback. You can select a passage and ask it to rewrite, tighten, expand, fix the dialogue, add sensory detail, or convert telling into showing. It suggests, you decide.

That distinction matters. Your voice stays your voice.

Who it is for

Rule of Words is for novelists who take their craft seriously. Whether you are working on your first novel or your fifteenth, whether you write literary fiction or genre thrillers, whether you embrace AI or avoid it entirely - the tool adapts to your workflow, not the other way around.

If that sounds like what you have been looking for, give it a try. I think you will feel the difference immediately.