Every author has a breaking point with their writing setup. For Casey Kerbs, a registered dietitian in New York, it was finishing her book “How To Lose Weight Without Losing Your Mind” and realizing the hardest part wasn’t the writing. It was finding her own damn notes.
Her research lived in one app. Her outline lived in another. Every session started with the same scavenger hunt through tabs and folders looking for that thing she wrote last week about the thing she needed right now.
So she built something better.
A Nutritionist Builds a Writing App
LivingWriter didn’t come from a product roadmap or a VC pitch deck. It came from a writer who was sick of the friction between thinking and writing.
Kerbs pulled together developers and other writers (several of them published authors) and built the tool she wished had existed. The team is based in Riverhead, New York, and they actually use the thing they’re building, which is weirdly rare in software. 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 most tech companies forget about,” she’s said. Their favorite thing, according to their own about page, is hearing that a writer finished and published something using the platform. That’s… actually kind of wholesome?
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 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 browser app. Dark mode, comfortable typography for long sessions, the usual good stuff. It gets out of your way and lets you write.
Behind that clean surface, there’s real structure 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, objects, whatever matters to your story. 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 discovery writers a safety net if they want one. (As a plotter myself, I appreciate this.) There are templates for biography and academic projects too, a nod to the tool’s nonfiction roots.
Smart Elements: The Feature That Actually Matters
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. You create entries in the Element Board for your characters, locations, and key objects. Fill in whatever details matter, from physical descriptions to backstory to relationships, nicknames, whatever you need. Then go back to drafting.
When you type a character’s name in your manuscript, LivingWriter recognizes it. A small card pops up with that character’s details, right there in the editor. No tab switching. No digging through a separate notes document. The info just… shows up when you need it.
This sounds small.
It really, really 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 pain. That mid-sentence stop to go searching through your notes? Smart Elements kills it. You stay in the draft. You keep writing.
For writers managing large casts or series with recurring characters, this kind of passive reference system changes how a writing session feels. You stop worrying about consistency errors and start trusting that the details are just… there.
The AI Suite
LivingWriter has AI features, and they’ve done something I wish more apps would do with them. Every single one is opt-in. If you never touch them, they never touch your manuscript. The company also states plainly that nothing you send to the AI is stored and your work is never used for training. Thank you, LivingWriter. Seriously.
The toolkit covers the bases you’d expect. AI Chat lets you talk through plot problems without bothering a critique partner at midnight (we’ve all been there). AI Analysis examines chapters for tone and narrative consistency. AI Rewrite transforms selected text into different styles or tenses. AI Outlines can generate story structures for any genre, and AI Summarize condenses sections and suggests improvements.
Two features stand out. AI Element Generation can create characters and settings 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 one click, which is pretty cool for authors thinking about adaptation.
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 per-use charges, which keeps things simple but means you’re trusting their choice of model. If you want to pick between Claude and GPT for different tasks, this isn’t the tool for that. If you just want AI that works without API key management, it’s one less thing to think about.
What LivingWriter Doesn’t Do
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. For print-ready books, you’ll want something like Atticus or Vellum for that last mile.
Not a full worldbuilding system. Smart Elements are great for quick-reference character and location details, but if you’re building a fantasy world with intricate magic systems and faction hierarchies, a dedicated worldbuilding tool like NovelCrafter’s Codex goes deeper.
It’s a subscription. $14.99/month, or $144 billed annually (works out to $12/month). There’s a lifetime option at $699. The 14-day free trial doesn’t require a credit card, and the company promises that once you lock in a price, they won’t raise it on you. (That’s a nice touch.)
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.
Who Should Try It
Google Docs authors who keep losing track of character details across fifty browser tabs will feel the difference immediately. Scrivener users who love the organization but want something that feels like it was built in this decade will too.
Smart Elements alone is worth the free trial. Having your characters’ details pop up automatically as you type is one of those features that sounds gimmicky until you use it for a week and can’t go back. The 14-day trial doesn’t ask for a credit card, so there’s really no reason not to find out if it clicks for you.
