SecondWriter

Inspiration

I've always wanted to be an author, but I've never been able to complete the stories that I start. I decided to build an app for people like me, who have plenty of ideas but need help completing their stories.

What it does

Write Your Novel Like Playing an Adventure Game

• When writing, the AI will generate two short story beats for the author to pick from
• If the author doesn't like those, they can request specific details to be included
• New story beats will be generated, enabling authors to quickly "discover" their story!

Writing can now be visual

• Images are generated for every aspect of the story, including story beats, characters, locations, items, and a cover image for the novel (powered by Replicate)
• Use the story mode view to read your book like a graphic novel!

Learns from your writing style

• SecondWriter can learn from a sample of your writing
• It also follows any writing rules provided by the author
• If you prefer, you can also emulate the style of an author in the public domain

Chat with your characters

• Authors can chat with their characters, with the option to use voice (powered by ElevenLabs Conversational AI).
  
• This is a great way to understand the viewpoint of characters and help generate ideas.

Story idea generator

• Generates interesting novel ideas, complete with plots, characters, locations, and items.

How we built it

Tech stack

• Text generation: Google Gemini
• Backend (auth, storage, database, functions): Supabase
• Frontend: Netlify
• Voice chat: ElevenLabs
• Image generation: Replicate

Primarily built on Bolt

• The landing page (secondwriter.com) was made completely in Bolt and runs on Astro
• The writing studio (app.secondwriter.com) was started in Bolt, including most of the user interface
• After starting to build the backend, I hit Bolt's hard limit on project size
• Once that size limit was reached, I continued development in Cursor, thanks to Bolt's GitHub integration

Challenges we ran into

• Creating images that match the style of the story
• Generating story ideas that were not repetitive
• Hitting the maximum size for Bolt projects
• Managing super large context and complex AI prompts

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• To be honest, I'm very proud of all the features of SecondWriter!
• I love that SecondWriter makes the writing process much more visual (I'm a visual learner, so this helps me visualize my stories)
• Custom UX for generating and revising story beats

What we learned

• AI is often too repetitive, with a bias for commonly used phrases. Prompt engineering is hard!
• Bolt works very well with many integrations (Supabase, ElevenLabs, Netlify, Gemini, Replicate, etc)

What's next for SecondWriter

• On board the first batch of alpha testers and gather feedback.
• Keep iterating on the AI prompts to improve the quality of generated writing.
• Provide more tools for managing the story arc and plots.

Built With

• bolt
• elevenlabs
• gemini
• github
• netlify
• replicate
• supabase