Your First Project
Ishvana has a lot of surface area. Fifteen sidebar sections, six agents, a Legendry database, an outline tree, a Plot Studio, a Timeline Studio, a Magic System module, a Marketing suite, and an API. You could easily spend an hour exploring every tab and still not touch the core workflow that most authors actually use day to day. This tutorial skips all of that. It walks you through the minimal path from a freshly installed Ishvana to a scene written with the writing coach in the room — creating a project, adding a single lore entry, setting up a single-chapter outline, writing a few paragraphs of your own, getting Hawken’s feedback on them, and running a Lorekeeper consistency check on the whole thing. It takes about ten minutes if you don’t stop to explore, and maybe half an hour if you do. When you finish, you’ll have seen the loop that everything else in the app either feeds into or builds on top of, and you’ll know which parts to go deeper on.
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Create a new project.
When Ishvana opens for the first time, you’ll see the project screen. Click New Project and give it a name — “My Fantasy Novel” is fine for a tutorial, though you’ll probably want something specific to your actual book when you start for real.
The project is the container for everything: manuscripts, Legendry entries, outlines, plot tracking, agent conversations, settings. Every project is independent — switching between projects switches every tab in the app to that project’s data. You can have as many projects as you want and they don’t share state.
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Add your first Legendry entry.
Open The Legendry from the sidebar. This is your worldbuilding database, and every agent in Ishvana reads it before it helps you.
- Click the + button to create a new entry.
- Pick a type — start with Character. Twelve types are available (Character, Location, Faction, Item, Event, Concept, Species, Language, Religion, Legends, Article, Custom) and each one loads a different section template.
- Give your character a name and fill in whatever you know about them. Don’t try to fill every section on the first pass — most characters grow in detail as the book grows. Background, personality, and a sentence or two about appearance is enough for now.
- Save the entry.
This step matters more than it looks like it does. When you ask Hawken for help with a scene featuring this character in step 5, Hawken will read the entry first. The quality of every suggestion Hawken makes scales directly with the quality of your Legendry. A character with three sentences of backstory produces generic feedback; a character with real detail produces feedback grounded in who they actually are.
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Set up the outline.
Switch to the Writing tab and open the Outline view. This is where you organize your story structure before you write prose.
- Click New Book to create a top-level book node.
- Right-click the book and select Add Child to create your first chapter.
- Add a scene or two under the chapter using the same method.
- Set a word count target on each scene if you want Desktop to track progress against it.
The outline supports seven levels of hierarchy — Series, Book, Part, Act, Chapter, Scene, Beat — but you only need as many as your book actually uses. A short novel might have Book > Chapter > Scene and nothing more. A long series might need all seven. Use what fits. You can add and remove levels at any time.
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Create a document and start writing.
Select a scene in your outline and click Create & Link. This creates a new manuscript document tied to that scene.
The editor opens with a blank page. Start typing. The editor is a full-featured rich-text surface with auto-save, spell-check, and inline entity detection — you don’t need to think about any of that right now, you just need to write a few sentences so step 5 has something to work with.
Two sentences is enough. Three is fine. The tutorial isn’t grading you on the draft.
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Ask Hawken for help.
Hawken is Ishvana’s writing coach. He reads your prose and gives you advice on it. He doesn’t draft your book for you — the prose stays yours — but he can suggest line-level improvements, sketch a rough version of where a scene might go when you’re stuck, and give you craft notes you can act on. There are three ways to invoke him from the editor, and all three show up naturally as you write:
- Slash commands. Type
/at the start of a line and a command palette appears. Try Rewrite or Extend on text you’ve selected — Hawken proposes a version, you accept or reject. Continue sketches a rough idea of what might come next from where your cursor sits, but think of that one as a direction to react against, not a draft to keep. - The Hawken panel. Click the Hawken button in the toolbar to open a full panel where you can have a conversation with him. Ask for a scene-shaping discussion, talk through character motivation, get an opinion on a tonal choice — whatever the question is. When the conversation produces something worth keeping, you can push it into your document with one click.
- Agent bubble menu. Select any passage and a context menu appears with quick assists — rewrite, extend, shorten, simplify, fix grammar. Each one returns a suggestion you accept or reject; nothing changes until you accept.
Try all three on the few sentences you wrote. Notice that Hawken references the character you created in step 2 — your specific character, with the details you put in the Legendry entry, because he read the entry before he said a word. That grounding is the thing that separates Ishvana’s agents from the bolted-on chatbot features in other writing tools, and it’s the reason spending real time on your Legendry pays off downstream.
- Slash commands. Type
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Run a consistency check.
After you’ve written a page or two, open the Lorekeeper panel from the Writing module’s sidebar. Lorekeeper is the consistency specialist — it reads your prose against your Legendry and flags places where they don’t match.
Click Run Check. The analysis streams in real time and you’ll see issues appear as they’re found. Critical issues (hard contradictions) show up at the top in red; warnings and minor issues are below. Each issue is linked to the text location and the affected Legendry entry, so you can jump to either one with a click.
Most early projects have zero issues because there’s not much prose yet. That’s fine — the point of running the check on a small sample is that you see how the feedback loop works, so when you have a real manuscript with a hundred thousand words in it, running Lorekeeper is already a habit.
What you just learned
Section titled “What you just learned”That’s the core loop. Build the world in the Legendry. Outline the book. Write prose. Ask Hawken for feedback when you want a second opinion or when you’re stuck. Check consistency when you’ve written enough to matter. Every other feature in Ishvana either feeds into one of these steps (the Plot Studio feeds the outline, Entity Detection feeds Lorekeeper, the Magic System feeds characters) or layers on top of them (Marketing, Bookmaker, Analysis). Starting here and expanding outward is usually easier than trying to understand all fifteen sidebar sections at once.