Capture passages, observations, and seeds with a single keystroke. Build a personal library of notes and sources you can draw on with perfect recall — so the page is never blank, and what fills it is yours.
Download for MacThe line doesn't wait. A turn of phrase in a paragraph, a stranger's sentence in a café, an image from a film you saw last week — anything can be the detail that lands a scene a year from now. Captured in a keystroke, sourced automatically, accumulated into the material you draw on when the page is open.
Mid-novel. Deep in a paragraph. Reading on the bus. Mark what strikes you, hit the shortcut, and you're back in the sentence.
Leo automatically saves the context of your notes — book titles, page numbers, article URLs, podcast timestamps, video frames. So you can jot a phrase mid-read and find your way back to the passage when you sit down to write.
Collect passages, observations, and seeds over months and across sources. The line you marked last winter is still there this spring — sourced, searchable, ready to draw on when the scene needs it.
Ask across everything you've kept — what's the through-line, where does this image keep showing up, what does the evidence in your own pages actually say — and pull together the material you need for the next draft. Use Leo's built-in model, or connect it to your favourite LLM.
The premise of the novel, the question of the essay, the through-line you've been circling. Keep the centre of the project visible on the page, and let everything you collect feed back into it.
Save the lines, images, and turns of phrase that strike you. Build a personal library of reference material to draw on when you sit down to write.
Capture what you notice the moment you notice it — the overheard line, the gesture, the weather. Build a record of the world as you saw it, ready for the page that needs it.
Work through the writers shaping how you'd actually do this — how they pace a chapter, cut a scene, land a sentence. Save the moves, the rhythms, and the structural tricks you'd want to steal — sourced automatically.
Sharpen the language as it forms — the line you almost wrote, the version that finally lands. Tie each pass to the page or the reading that prompted it, so revision starts from material rather than the void.
Jot down the rough idea next to the material that sparked it. Build a backlog of starting points, so the next thing to write is never starting from scratch.
Aurelius wrote the Meditations as a private notebook in moments stolen from a campaign on the Danube — addressed to himself, in Greek, never meant for publication. The book that came down to us is a working leader's commonplace: principles tested against the day, set down in the language he wanted to think in.
Montaigne retired to his château library at thirty-eight and read, marked, and copied for nearly ten years before publishing. The Essais grew directly out of those margins — a book of his own thinking grafted onto the quotations he'd collected, some of them painted on the beams above his desk. He invented the modern essay by reading first.
For nine and a half years, Pepys kept a daily diary in shorthand — six volumes covering the Restoration, the Plague, and the Great Fire. He wrote with no audience in mind, which is exactly why the book that survives reads less like history and more like a desk being cleared each evening — and why the seventeenth century is more vividly recorded than most centuries since.
Emerson started keeping journals at seventeen and never stopped — by his death, more than 230 of them. The lectures and essays he became known for were stitched together from those pages: a passage marked five years earlier would surface in the next sermon, the next talk, the next book. Self-Reliance traces back to lines he’d been working over since college.
Chekhov filled small notebooks with overheard lines, character sketches, and dispassionate observations — "A man who has seen too much and is ashamed of it." The fragments turn up later, often nearly verbatim, in the late stories and plays. The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, and The Lady with the Dog all carry phrases first set down in those pages.
Woolf kept a writing diary alongside her reading notebooks for almost thirty years — the diary for daily life, the notebooks for what she read and wanted to remember. A Room of One's Own and The Common Reader were both written out of the reading notebooks. She separated the two registers on purpose, and used both.
Highsmith filled thirty-eight cahiers — about 8,000 pages — between 1938 and her death in 1995. She used them to draft scenes, argue with herself about character, and try lines twenty different ways before committing them. Strangers on a Train, the Ripley novels, and the Carol manuscript all came out of those notebooks.
Didion's 1966 essay On Keeping a Notebook is the standard apologia for the practice — not, she argued, for keeping a record of what happened, but for keeping a record of how it felt to be the person who'd noticed it. The notebooks she kept on that principle fed Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and forty more years of essays.
