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Showcase pieces use fictional titles, authors, and events to illustrate real workflows in Wigma.

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The setup

Kaori Yamada blocked five days at a quiet airfield inn with two people who had already read the zero draft on paper: Vik Deshmukh, who used to certify airframes for a living, and Elena Marín, a line editor who cares about rhythm more than plot. Kaori’s rule was borrowed from other writers using Wigma for retreats: if it changes the book, it lives in the app. No more “we fixed that over wine” with no trail for the next draft.

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The book

Orbit is literary fiction with a technical spine. Rin Okada is an aerobatic pilot stepping back onto the competition circuit thirteen months after her wife Mara Vance died in a training accident. The manuscript is organized in named maneuvers (chandelle, loop, hesitation roll) as chapter titles: each section is a loop of memory, procedure, and self-accusation. Logline: Rin wants a clean season and a verdict from the investigation board. What she gets is Mara’s old logbook, a rival who will not stop being kind, and the slow understanding that precision in the cockpit and precision in love are not the same kind of truth. Vik guarded physics and regulation (what fails, what the NTSB would say). Elena guarded sentence length and breath (where Rin’s voice goes flat when she lies to herself).

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Scratches: radio calls and unsayable things

Monday was Scratches first. Kaori collects radio cadence before she trusts dialogue: cleared calls, half-heard tower jokes, the specific way Rin abbreviates danger when Mara was still alive. She also keeps a Scratch titled lines Rin will never say aloud, not for insertion, but so those sentences stop colonizing real scenes in disguise. When a Scratch line survived (“Mara liked the dangerous part of me until she didn’t”), it graduated to Atlas under Relationship: Rin / Mara with a tag for which draft it first became true.

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Atlas: aircraft, airfields, ghosts

Tuesday they built structure without turning the novel into a manual:
  • Characters: Rin Okada (competition number, superstitions, shoulder injury timeline); Mara Vance (present only in flashback rules Kaori pinned: never in present tense after chapter four); Jules Okonkwo (rival pilot, deliberately generous); Tessa Hwang (crew chief, carries institutional memory of the crash).
  • Locations: Monroe Field (home base), Chenango Aerodrome (first contest site), the practice box where Mara’s last flight is blocked as a location entry so continuity stays one version of the geometry.
  • Lore: airworthiness directives that matter to the plot, scoring criteria for the category Rin flies, investigation status as a living note that updates when Rin learns something new.
Vik clicked from Rin’s aircraft entry to maintenance notes when Kaori wrote a line about vibration. Elena clicked from Rin’s voice notes to Mara’s flashback cap when a memory ran too long for the chapter’s maneuver.

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Character chat: Rin on the ground

Wednesday they used Character chat with Rin, seeded from Atlas only (no hidden bible in email). Prompts were small: preflight when she slept badly; press interview when she smiles wrong; parking next to Mara’s old hangar. When Rin’s replies came back too articulate, Kaori tightened shame and fatigue in the character sheet. When a reply landed meaner than the draft, they asked whether the meanness was true or performance and split the difference in motivation links. Chat stayed expendable. The Atlas stayed what the next draft would enforce.

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One scene in the Editor

Thursday they protected one scene for prose: Rin’s first public flight after Mara, four minutes from chock to shutdown, intercut with three sentences of investigation-board language she is pretending not to rehearse. In the Editor, Rin, aircraft, and maneuver checklist stayed in the sidebar. Every order Rin gave the airplane had to match what she is allowed to know about the failure that killed Mara at that point in the book. Vik caught a torque mistake. Elena caught a comma that made Rin sound calm when she was not.

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What stayed in the project

By Friday checkout, Orbit was still mid-draft, but the Wigma project carried everything the next month would need: Scratches for cadence and forbidden speech, Atlas for machines, grief rules, and rivalries, Character chat folded into character truth, and one scene that proved Rin’s head and the technical world could share a single page. If you write precision under pressure (whether in a cockpit, an OR, a kitchen, or a courtroom), the same layout applies: Scratches for what you are afraid to say, Atlas for what must not contradict, Character chat when voice needs stress-testing, Editor when the reader finally rides along.