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 sync a story to Google Docs, that copy lives in your own Google account, under your own login. We never see it and cannot reach it without you.

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, beauty, and organization: a "Previously..." recap woven from your own words so you can pick a story back up cold, a cast list pulled from your prose, a nudge when you are stuck, cover art, and maps. It is AI as memory, never AI as author.

Exactly what gets sent, and when

• A recap or cast list: up to about the first 12,000 characters of that story, sent once, when you ask.
• A Muse idea: the story so far, sent once, when you ask.
• Dictation: the audio clip you just recorded, sent once to be transcribed.
• A cover or a piece of art: your title and a short description, never the manuscript.

Nothing is sent on its own. A writer who never touches those features never has a word leave the building.

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 refuses to send anything before every single call, whether it is a recap, a Muse idea, 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 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 every story, character, map, and note, at any time, in formats you can open anywhere.
• Delete a story and it is gone from our database.
• 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.