writerslogic/scrivener-mcp

MCP server for Scrivener: connect your novels, screenplays, and manuscripts to Claude, ChatGPT, and any AI assistant, with document management, writing analysis, content enhancement, offline semantic search, and character/plot tracking.
Install ·
What You Can Do ·
All Tools ·
Guides ·
Contributing
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Scrivener MCP lets your AI assistant open, read, edit, analyze, and search your Scrivener projects directly. No exporting, no copy-pasting text back and forth. Tell it which project to open and start working.
> **You:** Open my novel and analyze the pacing in Chapter 12.
>
> **Claude:** *Opens the .scriv project, reads Chapter 12, runs pacing analysis.* The first half moves well, but the middle stalls — a three-page internal monologue starting at paragraph 14 kills the momentum you built in the confrontation scene. Consider cutting it to a paragraph and moving the backstory to Chapter 8.
Works with Claude Desktop, Claude Code, VS Code (Copilot/Continue), Cursor, and any MCP-compatible client. Scrivener 3 on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Listed on the official MCP Registry as io.github.writerslogic/scrivener-mcp.
Install
Restart Claude Desktop and it's ready. Other clients need one more step:
This finds Claude Code, Claude Desktop, and Cursor and configures them for you. To set up Claude Code by hand instead: claude mcp add -s user scrivener -- npx scrivener-mcp, then restart it (or run /mcp).
Other ways to install
**Smithery**
**npx, no install**
or add it to Claude Desktop's config directly:
**From GitHub**
**Homebrew (macOS)**
**Docker**
Any other MCP client: point it at npx scrivener-mcp as a stdio server.
Optional: AI-powered features
Document management, deterministic analysis, keyword search, and project memory work with no API key at all. Writing analysis, generation, enhancement, and semantic search need one — Anthropic, OpenAI, or OpenRouter. Set more than one and Claude handles chat by default; override with AI_PROVIDER=openai or AI_PROVIDER=openrouter (OpenRouter defaults to anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6, change it with OPENROUTER_MODEL). If the active provider fails on an account-level error — bad key, no credit, an outage — the server retries on the next one you've configured. If your MCP client supports sampling, chat-based features can run through the client's own model instead, no separate key needed. Semantic indexing itself always runs locally through the Holographic Memory System; only semantic_search's query interpretation needs a provider.
Keys are picked up automatically from:
- ANTHROPIC_API_KEY / OPENAI_API_KEY / OPENROUTER_API_KEY
- ~/.env or ~/.scrivener-mcp/.env
- ~/.anthropic/key, ~/.openai/key, ~/.openrouter/key
- macOS Keychain (anthropic-api-key / openai-api-key / openrouter-api-key)
What You Can Do
> Open a project first. The server has no link to the Scrivener app itself and can't see what's open there — say *"Open my Scrivener project at ~/Documents/My Novel.scriv"*, or *"Discover my Scrivener projects"* if you don't know the path. On macOS, *"Use the project I have open in Scrivener"* works too (the first time, macOS will ask permission to control Scrivener). Do this once per conversation. If the project is also open and unsaved in Scrivener itself, save or close it there first, or the two can write over each other.
**Manage your manuscript.** Read chapters, create scenes, reorganize the binder, update synopses — all through conversation. *"Create a new scene called 'The Reveal' after Chapter 5, and move the old epilogue to the trash."*
**Analyze your writing.** Readability, pacing, style, dialogue quality, emotional arc — grounded in your actual prose, not generic advice. Ask whether a chapter's pacing is off and get specifics: which paragraphs stall, how the scene compares to your other chapters, filter-word density against your own average.
**Enhance your prose.** Targeted edits: cut filter words, strengthen verbs, vary sentence structure, add sensory detail, turn telling into showing, tighten dialogue, fix pacing.
**Track characters and plot.** Character profiles, plot threads, and style guides persist with the project across sessions. Save a profile for a character once; a consistency check months later catches contradictions — dialogue that doesn't sound like them, a limp that disappears for a chapter.