Casey Kerbs spent years helping people lose weight. As a registered dietitian in New York, she coached hundreds of patients through meal plans, cravings, and the messy psychology of changing habits. Then she wrote a book about it.
The book itself wasn’t the problem. The process of writing it was.
Her research lived in one place. Her outline lived in another. Her manuscript was in a third. Every writing session started with the same ritual: hunting through tabs and folders to find the thing she’d written last week about the thing she needed to reference now. She finished the book, “How To Lose Weight Without Losing Your Mind,” and came away convinced there had to be a better way to organize the writing process.
So she built one.
A Nutritionist Builds a Writing App
LivingWriter launched out of that frustration. Not from a product roadmap or a venture capital pitch deck, but from a writer who was tired of the friction between thinking and writing.
Kerbs recruited developers and other writers (several of them published authors) and built the kind of tool she wished had existed while she was juggling research notes and manuscript drafts. The team is based in Riverhead, New York, and they operate with a philosophy that feels uncommon in software: they actually use the thing they’re building. The company updates ship monthly, and the ideas come from the same people using LivingWriter to write their own books.
It took three years to become consistently profitable. Kerbs credits the writers who gave her feedback along the way, and she’s built the company around that relationship. “Relationships with customers are what’s forgotten when it comes to today’s tech products,” she’s said. The team’s favorite thing, according to their own about page, is hearing that a writer finished and published something using the platform.
What You Get When You Open LivingWriter
LivingWriter is a cloud-based writing app. You open it in a browser (or on the iOS, Android, or desktop apps), and you get a clean, modern writing environment with a sidebar full of organizational tools.
The interface is intentionally minimal. When you start typing, the sidebar fades away, leaving you with something that feels closer to a dedicated writing device than a typical browser app. Dark mode is available, and the typography is comfortable for long sessions. It’s not trying to impress you with features. It’s trying to disappear.
Behind that clean surface, there’s real structure available when you want it.
Four boards organize your project: a Plot Board for visual story mapping (think sticky notes you can drag between acts), an Outline Board for chapter-by-chapter structure, a Research Board for reference material, and an Element Board for tracking characters, locations, and objects. Each board serves a different phase of the writing process, and you can use all of them or ignore the ones that don’t match how you work.
LivingWriter also ships with eleven pre-built story templates, including the Hero’s Journey, Save the Cat, the Three Act Structure, and Dan Harmon’s Story Circle. These aren’t just labels on empty folders. They come with structural beats and plot points already mapped out, giving plotters a framework to build from and giving discovery writers a safety net if they want one. There are templates for biography and academic projects too, a nod to the tool’s nonfiction roots.
Smart Elements: The Feature That Changes How You Draft
A lot of writing apps help you organize your characters. LivingWriter is one of the few that brings your characters to you.
The feature is called Smart Elements, and it works like this: you create entries in the Element Board for your characters, locations, and key objects. You fill in whatever details matter, from physical descriptions to backstory to relationships and nicknames. Then you go back to drafting.
When you type a character’s name in your manuscript, LivingWriter recognizes it. A small card surfaces with that character’s details, right there in the editor. You don’t switch tabs. You don’t open a sidebar. You don’t go hunting through a separate notes document. The information comes to you, in context, at the moment you need it.
This sounds small. It isn’t.
If you’ve ever written a scene where a character walks into a room and you can’t remember what color eyes you gave them in chapter two, you know the specific frustration of stopping mid-sentence to go searching. Smart Elements eliminates that interruption. It keeps you in the draft. It keeps you writing.
For writers managing large casts, multiple storylines, or series with recurring characters, this kind of passive reference system changes the texture of a writing session. You stop worrying about consistency errors and start trusting that the details are there when you need them.
The AI Suite: Helpful, Not Pushy
LivingWriter added AI features (that’s the “+AI” in the name), and the way they’ve implemented them reflects the tool’s overall personality: available when you want them, invisible when you don’t.
Every AI feature is 100% opt-in. If you never touch them, they never touch your manuscript. The company states plainly that nothing you send to the AI is stored and your work is never used for training. For authors with privacy concerns, that’s a meaningful commitment.
The toolkit includes several features worth knowing about. AI Chat lets you have a conversation about your manuscript, useful for talking through plot problems or exploring character motivations without bothering a critique partner at midnight. AI Analysis examines chapters for tone, texture, and narrative consistency. AI Rewrite transforms selected text into different styles, tenses, or registers. AI Outlines can generate story structures for any genre, and AI Summarize condenses sections and suggests improvements.
Two features are particularly thoughtful for authors. AI Element Generation can create characters, settings, and objects (complete with AI-generated images), giving you a starting point when you’re building out a new world instead of staring at blank element cards. And AI Screenplay converts chapters into industry-standard screenplay format with a single click, which is quietly powerful for authors exploring adaptation or writing in multiple formats.
The underlying AI model isn’t disclosed, and there’s no bring-your-own-key option. The AI is included in your subscription with no separate per-use charges, which simplifies things but means you’re trusting the platform’s choice of model. If you’re the kind of writer who wants to choose between Claude and GPT for different tasks, this isn’t the tool for that. If you just want AI that works without managing API keys, it’s one less thing to think about.
What LivingWriter Doesn’t Do
It’s not a formatting tool. LivingWriter handles drafting and organization, not final book layout. You can export to DOCX, PDF, or directly to Amazon Manuscript for KDP, but there’s no EPUB export and no interior design tools. If you need a print-ready book, you’ll want something like Atticus or Vellum for that final step.
The Smart Elements aren’t a full worldbuilding system. They’re great for quick-reference character and location details, but if you’re building a fantasy world with intricate magic systems, faction hierarchies, and progression-tracked character arcs, a dedicated worldbuilding tool like NovelCrafter’s Codex goes deeper.
It’s a subscription. $14.99 per month, or $144 billed annually (which works out to $12 per month). There’s a lifetime option at $699. The 14-day free trial requires no credit card, which gives you enough time to make an informed decision. The company also promises that once you lock in a price, they won’t raise it on you.
It’s web-first. Desktop and mobile apps exist, and cloud sync works across devices, but LivingWriter was designed for the browser. If reliable offline writing is essential to your workflow, test that during the trial.
The Bottom Line
LivingWriter occupies a specific sweet spot: more organized than Google Docs, cleaner and more modern than Scrivener, less demanding than tools built for deep worldbuilders. It was built by a writer who got frustrated with the gap between “I need to write” and “I need to find my notes first,” and that origin shows in every design choice.
Smart Elements is the genuine standout. Having your characters’ details surface automatically as you type is a small, thoughtful feature that adds up across hundreds of writing sessions. It turns the tool from a place where you write into a place where your whole story lives.
If you write fiction or nonfiction that involves keeping track of characters, research, and structure, and you want a modern platform that handles the organizational overhead without a steep learning curve, LivingWriter is worth the 14 days. You’ll know pretty quickly whether it fits how you work.
