Pages

A place for everything that belongs around the book.

Research, the history of a house, a question you are still answering, the ending you are not sure of yet. A Page is a plain document that lives in the project without being part of the manuscript.

Why Pages exist

A novel generates more writing than the novel. A question about a character’s choice that will never appear on the page. A description of a house that three scenes draw on. Reasons you are still weighing. Most of this thinking belongs near the manuscript, and none of it belongs in it.

Sutura keeps that boundary firm. Prose lives in Scenes, placed in Chapters or kept aside as Unplaced Scenes, and the ordered manuscript is made only of those. Everything else that helps you write it has somewhere to go: a Page.

Page

Why the letters wait

She has the letters by noon and does not open them until the next morning. Every reader will ask why. I need to know the answer before she does, even if she never says it.

Possible reasons

She knows her mother’s hand, and does not want that voice back in the house yet.
Three letters at once means someone kept them. She wants to know who, first.
Island habit: nothing is opened until the tide has turned. (Too neat. Cut unless Mrs. Hale can say it.)

What the delay buys the book

A night with the letters unopened on the table. The house gets a scene to itself. And Tomas arrives before the contents do, so the reader meets him not knowing what she knows.

Rule for the chapter: the letters are weather, not a plot device. Let them change the pressure in every scene before anyone reads a word.

A Page is a document in the plain sense: headings, lists, paragraphs, a line you want to keep. It is set in the interface’s type rather than the manuscript’s, so you always know which kind of writing you are looking at.

Use a Page when structure would be overkill

Sutura does not decide what a Page is for. There is no research template, no location form, no fields waiting to be filled. A Page called The house and a Page called Ending ideas are the same kind of object; only you know that one is a place and the other a worry.

That is deliberate. Early in a book, most of what you know is provisional, and a system that asks you to classify a thought before you have understood it gets in the way of having it. Write the note. Give it a title. Move on.

When the same kind of information starts to repeat, a Collection may fit better. Collections

Not every thought needs a schema.

Pages stay part of the project

Pages live in the Workspace, beneath the manuscript in the same navigator, so the thinking stays beside the book rather than in another app or a document you will not find again. Arrange them however you think: loose, in Folders, or nested under one another. The arrangement is navigation only; moving a Page never changes what it is.

A Page can refer to a Scene, an Entry or another Page, and the thing referred to knows it. The note about the house is one step from the scene set in the house, in either direction.

Those references appear beside the writing. The Inspector