A program for writing long fiction — novels and screenplays — from the first draft through the revision. Chapters, scenes, characters, worldbuilding, maps and timeline in the same place, instead of scattered across four different programs.
A thriller with details that can't be forgotten?A twelve-book fantasy saga?A space opera with a tightly wound political plot?
Whichever one is yours. Qenna handles it — and handles it well.
See for yourself
Solarized Highlands
I The editorQenna Writer
A chapter three books ago is one click away
The Reference panel opens beside the page: any chapter, scene or sheet held open next to what you're writing, without switching windows and without losing the thread. Chapters split into scenes, and the scenes show up in the sidebar as sub-items.
Several manuscripts in one project — draft a whole trilogy without losing track of book one.
Drawers for characters, places, objects and lore, with a search that sweeps the entire drawer.
@ mentions linking characters and terms across documents.
Screenplay mode with the real elements — Scene, Action, Character, Dialogue, Parenthetical, Transition.
Repetition detector flagging repeated words, adverb pile-ups and paragraphs that ran too long.
The MapQenna Writer
The world your story happens in, on a map you can walk into
Generate a continent from a seed, or paint one by hand. The terrain is real relief: a mountain is height, not a picture of a mountain. Altitude, latitude and humidity decide the climate and the biome of every patch of ground, and rivers, coasts and forests follow from there.
Lands of Quelmar: generated from one seed, with castles, a cathedral and a colossus placed by hand.
Build on it
Castles, landmarks, ruins, ships, monsters at sea. Pick a piece from the catalog and click where it goes; it sits on the relief, and the hill in front hides what stands behind it.
The Build catalog: castles in a dozen styles, landmarks, legends, the sea, and brushes that paint whole cities and forests.Up close, at dusk.
Your documents live on it
Every territory is a group in your project. Click it on the map and its documents open right there: the laws, the roads, the people who live there, readable and editable without leaving the map. Name a castle and it becomes a place of its own, inside the kingdom.
Explore: the tree on the left takes the map to each place, and the document opens beside it.
Groups inside groups: a castle inside a kingdom, a family inside the castle. What belongs to the kingdom is visible from the castle too.
Places and people: a family or a guild isn't a place, so it can be marked as active in the territories it reaches.
Drag a document onto a group to move it there.
The same groups show up everywhere else in Qenna, map or no map.
Day, night, and other ways to see it
At night, windows, torches and lighthouses light up. The clock can run on its own.Ink: black and white, the way it would print in the front of the book.
Parchment.Nautical chart. Also Topographic, Watercolor and War plan.
Sizes from an island to a continent, and several maps in the same project.
Territories and borders, seeded or painted, in your own colors.
A ruler that measures distance and travel time.
PNG export at 1×, 2× or 3×, ready for the book.
Rotate it, tilt it, zoom from the whole continent down to a single tower.
New The Galaxy MapQenna Writer 2.0
New in 2.0
The same map, for stories set among the stars
Territories, groups, connections and documents work just like they do on the fantasy map, only now on a galactic scale: systems, planets, moons and whatever gets built around them. Start from the Milky Way (the Solar System included), Andromeda, M87 or the Sombrero, or generate a galaxy of your own.
The Threadvale Reach: a medium spiral galaxy generated from one seed, in the Full view.
Two ways to build it
When you create a galaxy, you pick a mode. Navigator is the 3D map: fly between systems, follow orbits and build in plain sight. Astronomer works through writing: your worlds grouped by territory, the document in the middle and the system on the side, with a small 3D map that comes along.
The New galaxy window. Each mode tells you its pros and cons before you choose.Astronomer: territories on the left, the page in the middle, the system and its fact sheet on the right.
Every world comes with its numbers
Mass, radius, gravity, density, temperature, the length of a day and of a year: every body gets physical data generated from real physics, plus a habitability class from I to VI. Keep the numbers, change them, or ignore them; the story decides.
A planet's sheet: overview, documents, what's in orbit, and the data.The Data tab. Generated in one click, editable like any other field.
Build in orbit
Orbital rings, fleets, orbital cities, stations, all the way up to a Dyson sphere around a star. Each one is a place of its own: name it and write about it.
Pylsha, with its orbital ring, a fleet, a city and a station.A whole system, around a star enclosed in a Dyson sphere.
Views: Full, Atlas, Sky, Infrared and Ink.
Organic seeding: systems appear as territories grow, and planets can populate themselves.
Documents written on the map go to a drawer or to the World Builder, your choice.
PNG export, and a guide to both modes in the Help panel.
II The whole manuscript at onceQenna Writer
Every chapter becomes a card, with the numbers inside it
Outline Mode opens the manuscript as bands of cards: how each chapter starts, its word count, how many lines of dialogue, the split between dialogue and narration, and who's on stage. None of that is a field you fill in — it's read from what you already wrote.
Up top: 5 chapters · 15 scenes · 2,873 words — added up on their own.
III Who's on stageQenna Writer
Know who showed up, where, and who said what
The Characters drawer holds a sheet, a photo and a role for each one. Qenna cross-checks that against the text and counts on its own: how many scenes a character appears in, how many lines they have, who they share the page with most.
A character sheet in the Case file style.The same sheet in Tabs. Also Magazine, Infobox and Dossier, with the fields you choose.
Presence detection per chapter and per scene.
Relationship graph built from who actually shows up together.
Searchable dialogue log — every line, sorted by who said it.
Reminders to flag what's left loose and come back before it goes cold.
The PensariumQenna Writer
What you notice along the way stays noted
The Pensarium is a floating panel that opens with F4. Highlight a passage and leave a comment on it, save a passage as a memory to check later, jot down loose notes — and find the book’s dialogue already sorted by who said it.
The comment sits on the passage itself. Tick Task and it goes into the Pensarium Review.Dialogue, each line under whoever said it — detected on its own.
Memories: passages set aside for later, with the chapter they came from.Notes: loose ideas, tied to no passage.
IV Before the first sentenceQenna Writer
A place for the parts that aren't prose yet
The Planning Board is a blank canvas: post-its, sheets, images and linked documents connected however the plot actually connects — not a mind-map with fixed nodes. Any card becomes a timeline event later.
The timeline builds itself from the date and summary already sitting in the chapter. When the story genuinely forks, a branch appears without being asked.For stories set on Earth, the real-world map keeps geography honest: real countries, a real distance ruler, and pins that stay where you put them.
V Make it yoursQenna Writer
473 themes, or one built from scratch
The page colour and the panel colour are independent — you can have a dark interface wrapped around a white page, or the other way around. You can set a day theme and a night theme and let Qenna switch on a schedule.
One Dark Skyline.Focus Mode: everything goes, the page stays.
Search by name and filters — search went in because scrolling stopped being reasonable somewhere around theme 80.The Patterned filter: the themes with photographic backgrounds, which is what gives Qenna the look it has.
The Theme Creator: background image, gradient, vignette and grain, with a before-and-after switch.Before switching, the preview splits the screen: the theme in use on one side, the one you’re eyeing on the other.
Search and favourites in the gallery — the heart marks the ones you keep coming back to.
Export and import a theme: a theme becomes a file and travels to another machine, or to another person.
Automatic switching by time of day between a day theme and a night theme.
Theme editor to duplicate a finished one and tinker, or build from nothing.
Ambient sound built in, no browser tab full of rain.
Movable bars — the toolbar goes wherever you'd rather have it.
And light, if that's you.
StatisticsQenna Writer
The project's numbers, counted on their own
The Statistics panel asks you to fill in nothing. It reads the manuscript and hands back each character's participation, the size of every chapter and a summary of the whole project — all of it from the text that's already there. It answers the question no ordinary editor answers: where is this book out of balance?
Participation per character as a share of scenes, words per chapter as bars, and the summary: 391,241 words in the project, 21 chapters, biggest and smallest chapter named.One character's sheet: appears in 20 of 21 scenes (95%), 3,614 lines detected, 92,071 words spoken — and who they share the page with most, in scenes, chapters and lines.
Presence per character, as a share of scenes — you can see at a glance who vanished from act two.
Words per chapter as bars, with the biggest and smallest named.
Chemistry: who shares the page with whom, counted in scenes, chapters and lines.
Lines and words spoken per character, kept apart from narration.
Not one of those fields is filled in by hand.
IndexQenna Writer
Everything else, one line each
World Builder
Territories as a tree — continent, kingdom, city — each with its own lore, and magic systems that only apply where you decide
Export
DOCX, ODT, PDF and EPUB — whole project, one manuscript, or a single chapter
Submission format
Standard Shunn manuscript, ready to send
Goals and habit
Word or time goals, streaks, Pomodoro and a calendar
Statistics
Total words, total time, longest streak
Read aloud
The text read out loud, by paragraph or by selection
Spelling and synonyms
Dictionary and thesaurus, in the app's language
Quick cover
A cover built inside Qenna: royalty-free photos, gradient, grain and your title
Backup
The whole project in a zip, in one click
Trash
Nothing is deleted for good
Five languages
Portuguese, English, Spanish, Italian and French
Source & licenseQenna Writer
License
The Qenna Writer License, based on GPLv3. Anyone can read, change and redistribute this code for free — nobody can turn it into a closed, or a paid, product.
One person builds and maintains this in spare time. Bugs get filed on GitHub Issues and are usually fixed in days, not quarters. There's no support queue to wait in.
Contact
To report bugs, suggest features, or just scream about your plot at 3:00 AM: qennawriter@gmail.com. It can take me a few hours or a few days to answer, but I will.
Links
Qenna is built in C++ and Qt, to put speed and performance first. You can read the source code here:
"You shouldn't have to pay to write good stories, or pay for the tools that help you write them. The only payment Qenna Writer asks for is: write good stories."
