Your words stay yours

By Brenn and Lindsay, the two writers who built Inkling

Writers ask us one question more than any other: if I put my story in here, who else gets to read it? Here is the whole answer, in plain language, with nothing left out.

We are writers first. We built Inkling because we wanted every tool we love in one place: the notes, the half-finished chapters, the character profiles, the maps of made-up places. And we built it at a moment when almost every writing tool is racing to generate your prose for you, and quietly learning from it along the way.

We think that gets the job backwards. A tool should give you insight into your own creativity, not replace it with the machine-made kind. So Inkling has a generator, and it has strict manners. This post is the full account of what it does, what it reads, what it keeps, and what it never touches.

Where your writing lives

Your stories, notes, characters, and maps are stored in Inkling's database, behind permissions tied to your account. A signed-in writer can only ever read their own rows. None of our admin screens show story text; the numbers we look at are counts, dates, and billing.

If you link a story to a Google Doc, that Doc lives in your own Google account. Inkling can open only the files you create with it or pick yourself, never the rest of your Drive. When you open a linked story, Inkling reads the Doc and keeps a copy in your account so your recap, word counts and earlier copies work.

One honest caveat, because you would want to know: like every hosted service, the two of us hold the keys to the database, so we could technically open it. We don't, and nothing we run reads your words. We would rather say that plainly than promise something no online service can truthfully promise.

What the generator actually does

The generator never writes your story. Not a sentence, not a suggested continuation, not a rewrite of your voice into something blander. Its jobs are memory and pictures: a "Previously..." recap woven from your own words so you can pick a story back up cold, a list of the cast and places in your draft, the place names for a map built from your story, dictation turned into text, and cover art. Muse is separate and reads nothing: its sparks come from Inkling's own lists. It is AI as memory, never AI as author.

Exactly what gets sent, and when

• A recap: about 12,000 characters of that story, its opening and the part nearest where you stopped. While the generator is on, recaps keep themselves current: Inkling refreshes a story's recap when you bring writing in, after you pause typing for about five minutes, and when you close a story you changed.
• A cast list: up to about the first 12,000 characters of that story, sent when you ask for it.
• A map from your story: up to about 16,000 characters of the story you choose, sent when you ask Inkling to read it for places.
• A Muse idea: nothing. Muse never reads your stories; every spark comes from Inkling's own lists.
• Dictation: the audio clip you just recorded, sent once to be transcribed.
• A cover: your title, the story's recap, and up to 3,000 characters of its opening, so the picture matches your story. You ask for each cover.
• A piece of art on your Art board: only the prompt you type.

Switch the generator off and none of this is sent at all. With it on, the only thing that happens on its own is the recap refresh above, and only for stories you are working on.

What happens on the other end

Inkling's generator runs on OpenAI's business API. Under its terms, what we send is not used to train or improve their models, and we have not opted in to change that. Requests are held for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring, then deleted. The model has no memory between requests: your recap cannot influence anyone else's output, and the next request starts from nothing. Your story is read once, the recap is written, and the words are let go.

The off switch is real

Open Setup and you will find the generator's On/Off switch. Off means off: the code checks before every single call and refuses to send anything, whether it is a recap, a cast list, a cover, or a map. Inkling becomes a private organizer for your writing, and everything else, from the storyboard to exports, keeps working exactly as before.

Why we didn't build the integrations everyone asks for

As writers and technologists, we had a long list of clever two-way connections we could have built. We chose not to build most of them. Every open door to another platform is a place your unpublished work could leak into the world before you meant it to. So Inkling connects out only where you choose: your own Google Docs, and gateways like Send to Substack where you copy out or download when you are ready. We take being librarians and keepers of your work seriously.

What you can always do

• Export your stories as Word, plain text, a print PDF, or a Google Doc while you write, and download your whole library as one Word file from Setup. If a trial ends, every story can still go to Google Docs.
• Delete a story and it moves to Recently deleted, where you can restore it for 30 days. After that it is removed for good. To delete your whole account, email us.
• Switch the generator off and keep everything else.
• Ask us anything at hello@inkling.digital. A real writer answers.

Your intellectual property is yours. Always. That was the premise the day we started, and it is the reason we could not build Inkling any other way. The full legal version lives in our privacy policy; this is the version we would tell a friend.