Reference Material and Cut Material
10 May 2026
In the Waxcap™ sidebar, two sections sit below the Manuscript. Reference Material holds your notes about the book. Cut Material holds prose you've taken out of it but aren't ready to throw away. Neither counts toward your daily word count, and neither appears in a manuscript you export, so sending the book to an agent won't include the character bible or the scenes you cut.
Reference Material
As well as the book itself, you'll probably want somewhere to keep track of your characters, the places in the story, when things happen, and any research you've done along the way.
Reference Material has folders for all of these: Characters, Locations, Objects, Themes, Timeline, World Rules, Research, and General for anything else. A new document in any of them starts with a template of prompts, so the page isn't blank. You can rewrite the prompts for each project, so a science-fiction novel's Locations template can ask about gravity and politics while a contemporary novel's asks about transit and weather. A folder you don't use can be hidden from the sidebar, and anything already in it is kept. The eight folders themselves are fixed.
When you want a character's notes in view while you write their scene, Option-click the note in the sidebar and it opens in the split editor, beside the scene.
Nothing in Reference Material ever goes into the book, so lay the notes out however suits you. Lists, fragments and half-finished sentences are all fine.
Cut Material
Cut Material is for prose you've decided against: a paragraph you tried that didn't work, a chapter that didn't fit, a draft of a scene you're going to come back to. When you want something back, right-click it and choose Move to Manuscript.
Cut Material stays out of manuscript, reading copy and ePub exports. The only export that can include it is the plain-text backup, and then only if you switch it on.