How Projects Are Organised
Spleen divides a longer work into projects, sections, and documents. Understanding those three levels makes the projects overview and writing sidebar easier to use.
Project
A project is the complete work you are creating in Spleen.
A project might be a novel, poetry collection, essay collection, manual, research text, or another longer work. It contains the sections, documents, notes, annotations, snapshots, and other material connected to that work.
You may think of a finished project as a manuscript in the ordinary writing sense, but Spleen’s interface uses project as the main term.
Project type
A project type is an optional label that describes the general form of a project, such as Novel, Poetry, or Journal. It helps you recognise the kind of work you are looking at, but it does not determine how that work must be structured or written.
You can choose a type when creating a project and change it later from the project overview. See Projects → Edit Project Details → Choosing a Project Type for all available types and how they behave.
Section
A section groups related documents within a project.
Sections can represent parts of a book, groups of chapters, poetry cycles, themes, acts, or any other division that helps organise the work. Their use is optional: documents can also exist outside a section.
A section can hold subsections, one level deep. A part can contain chapters that each contain scenes, for example. Create one from a section’s action menu with New subsection; subsections move, reorder, and export like any other section. Research sections nest the same way.
Document
A document is an individual piece of writing within a project.
Depending on the project, a document might be a chapter, scene, poem, essay, introduction, appendix, fragment, or working draft. Documents can be reordered and moved between sections as the structure develops.
Writing and research
The writing area contains the sections and documents that form the work itself. Writing documents appear in project exports and can be shared with readers.
A project can also have a separate research structure for ideas, people, places, references, and other supporting material. Research stays inside the workspace and does not become part of the main writing export.
Notes, annotations, and snapshots belong to individual documents in either the writing or research area. Their pages later in this guide explain how they support revision without becoming part of the written text.
The book, Archive, and Trash
The writing and research trees make up the book you are actively working on. A project also has two bins for sections and documents that no longer belong there:
- Archive is for material you want to keep but leave out of the book.
- Trash is for material you consider a mistake or no longer want.
Both appear under Out of the project in the sidebar when they contain something. Material in either bin is left out of project counts, search, reader shares, templates, and normal reading exports. It remains part of a Spleen Archive backup.
Sections keep their documents and subsections when moved into a bin. You can restore a section or document from either bin later. See Writing → The Writing Workspace → The Project Sidebar for the full workflow.