# Writing a Novel in Obsidian What works about drafting a novel in Obsidian, the plugin stack you end up maintaining, and where a Markdown vault stops short of a finished EPUB. - - Published 18 September 2026 - Updated 29 October 2026 > Writing a novel in Obsidian, and where it stops A reader asked us how InkSpine is better than Obsidian, and the question deserves a straight answer rather than a sales one. Here it is: what Obsidian gets right, what a novelist ends up building on top of it, and the specific places a folder of Markdown stops short of a finished book. ## Start with what Obsidian gets right Obsidian’s central idea is that your notes are plain Markdown files in a folder on your own disk. No database, no proprietary bundle, no account. If Obsidian disappeared tomorrow, every word you had written would still open in any text editor on earth. We think that is correct, and we didn’t arrive at it independently. The architecture decision that fixed InkSpine’s file format names Obsidian as the precedent, and the reasoning is written down: a writing tool earns trust by being leaveable. An InkSpine project is a folder of Markdown chapters and JSON metadata, sitting wherever you put it. Same bet, same reason. So this is not a comparison where we think the other tool has it backwards. We agree about the foundation. The disagreement is about what belongs on top of it. ## The setup a novelist ends up with Obsidian ships as a notes app. To draft a novel in it, you assemble the rest. Most of the setups writers share online are some version of this: - **Longform, or a book-export plugin** — To make a pile of notes behave like an ordered manuscript with a word count - **Pandoc, plus its Obsidian plugin** — To get anything other than a PDF out — installed separately, on every machine you write on - **Dataview** — To coax structured character and location fields out of note front matter - **Templater** — So a new character note starts with the right fields instead of a blank page - **Kanban, or the canvas** — To stand in for a corkboard of chapters and scenes - **Git, set up by hand** — Because periodic file recovery is not the same thing as a draft history None of that is unreasonable, and plenty of people finish books this way. But notice what it is: half a dozen independent projects, each with its own updates, each maintained by you, and each able to break in the week before a deadline. You end up the systems administrator of your own writing tool. For some writers that is genuinely part of the pleasure. If it isn’t for you, the rest of this page is the argument. ## 1. The last mile is most of the work A vault full of Markdown is not a book. A book is a file a store will accept: a valid EPUB 3, or a DOCX an editor can mark up — with a cover, title-page metadata, a table of contents, and chapters that break in the right places. Obsidian’s built-in export is PDF. For EPUB or DOCX you add a Pandoc plugin — and Pandoc itself, installed separately, on each machine you write on — and then work out the stylesheet, the metadata block, the chapter-break rules and the cover. Then you do it again the next time you change a chapter title. In InkSpine, export is a dialog. Pick the book and the format and you get a validated EPUB 3, a DOCX, or a proof-copy PDF, with your cover, metadata, front and back matter, part headers and in-text figures already handled. The EPUB our exporter produces is held to the EPUB 3 standard by epubcheck — the validator the stores themselves run — on every change we make to it, so the file you upload isn’t the first time anyone checked. **The part we care about most:** when an exporter meets something it cannot carry, it refuses and tells you, instead of quietly leaving it out of the file. Silent loss between formats is the worst bug a writing tool can have, because you find it after publication. It has a rule of its own in our codebase, and a test suite to match. ## 2. A graph of notes is not the shape of a story Obsidian’s graph view is beautiful, and it answers “what links to what”. A drafting novelist has a different question: is the rebellion actually going anywhere, or has it been silent since chapter four? That is the question that makes a middle sag, and no arrangement of backlinks answers it. InkSpine answers it three ways, all drawn over your real chapters rather than a separate plan you keep in sync by hand: a **corkboard** of chapter cards, a **plot overview** showing which characters appear in which chapters, and **story arcs** — one lane per storyline, its beats marked along it, and its longest gap stated as a number of chapters so you don’t have to count. Arcs belong to the series rather than to one book, so a plot running across a trilogy is one arc instead of three copies. ## 3. Characters that survive a rename In a vault, a character is a note, and the connection between that note and your manuscript is a `[[wikilink]]` you remembered to type. Where you simply wrote the name as prose — which is most places, because that is what prose is — there is no link at all, so backlinks show you a fraction of the truth. InkSpine treats characters, locations, factions and lore as structured entities with real fields, aliases, relationships and membership. Type `@` for an explicit reference and it resolves to a stable identifier, so renaming the character keeps every reference correct. A name written as ordinary prose is detected too, with no markup at all: the editor knows your roster and its aliases, so “appears in” is computed from what you actually wrote rather than from what you remembered to link. That last part is the one a vault cannot do for you. An unlinked name in a vault is just a word, so your backlinks are only ever as complete as your discipline was at one in the morning. ## 4. The history of a chapter, not of a file Obsidian’s File Recovery keeps periodic snapshots and hands them back a whole file at a time. The serious answer is to put the vault in git and run it yourself — which works, and is one more thing you now operate. InkSpine keeps that history for you, with nothing to set up and nothing to operate. It saves a version once you have been idle a few minutes, or the moment you ask for one. What you see is a History tab on the chapter you are writing: every past version of it, each opening straight into a side-by-side compare with the changes marked word by word. Found a sentence you shouldn’t have cut? Copy that passage back into your draft in one move. Your current text is never overwritten behind your back, and it is a single undo if you change your mind. ## 5. Counting the way a novelist counts A notes app counts the words in a note. A manuscript needs something narrower: how many words of *book* exist, and how many of them are new today. InkSpine counts manuscript prose only — not your notes, not scratch, not part headings — and “written today” is a net figure, so cutting 400 words during a revision doesn’t earn you 400 words for pasting them back. Each book carries a target, each chapter carries a status, the dashboard adds them up, and an activity heat map shows the year you actually had. Beside them sit the revision tools a general notes app has no reason to ship: a repeated-word scan that surfaces the pet words and verbal tics a draft accumulates, and full-text search across every chapter and note in the project. ## Where Obsidian is the better answer If we only listed our own wins, this page would be worth nothing to you. Obsidian is genuinely better than InkSpine at several things, and some of them may be exactly the things you need: 1. **It is on your phone.** Obsidian has first-party iOS and Android apps. InkSpine is desktop only — Windows, macOS and Linux. If you draft on a train with your thumbs, that is close to decisive. 2. **It is free.** For personal and commercial use alike, with no feature gate. InkSpine has a free version that never caps your writing; the publishable EPUB, DOCX and PDF files and unlimited worldbuilding are InkSpine Core, a one-time purchase — not a subscription, but not nothing either. 3. **Plugins do anything.** There are thousands, and a large community writing more. InkSpine has no plugin system, so what ships is what you get. 4. **It is a second brain, not just a book.** Research, reading notes, journals, everything else in your life, in one vault and all linkable. InkSpine is built for one job. 5. **Non-linear thinking is its home ground.** If your process is exploratory — a web of ideas that slowly becomes a book — a graph of linked notes suits that better than a list of chapters does. The honest summary is not that one app is better than the other. It is that Obsidian is a superb general tool you shape into a writing setup, and InkSpine is that setup, already built and maintained by someone else. The difference is whose evenings go into the assembly. ## You don’t have to pick a side Because both tools keep your words in plain Markdown, moving between them isn’t a migration in the usual painful sense. InkSpine recognises an Obsidian vault when you point it at one and offers to import it — each note at the top level of the vault becomes a chapter. And an InkSpine project is just a folder, so you can open it in any editor to read or fix something; InkSpine checks for changes made outside it when you come back to the window. Plenty of people will land on keeping both: the vault for research, reading notes and the thinking; InkSpine for the manuscript that has to become a book. That is a perfectly good answer, and it costs nothing to try in either direction. ## Being straight with you InkSpine is built for writers and shaped by their feedback. It has no mobile app, no plugin ecosystem, and hosted sync hasn’t shipped. If those are the three things standing between you and a finished manuscript, Obsidian is the better tool for you today, and we would rather say so than sell you something else. If what stands between you and a finished manuscript is the export, the continuity, and the hour a week you lose to maintaining the setup — that is the part we built. Keep reading [InkSpine vs Obsidian, side by side →](https://inkspine.app/vs/obsidian) [How to export an EPUB for Amazon KDP →](https://inkspine.app/epub-for-kdp) [A worldbuilding template for characters, places and lore →](https://inkspine.app/worldbuilding-template) Keep the folder of Markdown. Stop maintaining everything around it.