Skills, XP, and levels

Inkbreaker tracks your progress across specific writing skills: how much you write, where you are improving, and where you have room to grow.

Skills

Skills are craft dimensions: dialogue, pacing, clarity, compression, voice, imagery, and others. Each writing type has its own set of relevant skills. Some are universal (voice, clarity, concision). Others belong to a particular writing type (compression for poetry, scene economy for screenwriting).

XP

You earn XP by completing exercises. How much depends on the exercise difficulty and how your submission scores against the benchmarks for your writing type.

Levels

Levels run from 1 to 6 per skill. As you accumulate XP in a skill, you move through the levels. Your Report Card shows your current level in each skill you have practiced.

Skill focus

Your skill focus is the skill you are currently prioritizing for a given writing type. Inkbreaker uses it to recommend exercises. You can set your skill focus during onboarding, or change it any time from your Report Card. If you do not set one, Inkbreaker recommends a focus based on which of your skills has the most room to grow.

Experience level

Experience level is separate from your skill levels. Skill levels are earned, 1 through 6, and reflect the XP you have built up. Experience level is something you tell us: beginner, developing, or experienced. It sets the difficulty of the exercises we recommend, so the prompts meet you where you are.

You set a general experience level during onboarding, the one for your writing overall. Each writing type also gets its own experience level. A type follows your general level until you set a specific one for it, so you can be experienced in one form and a beginner in another. Set per-type levels during onboarding under each writing type you pick, or any time from your Report Card.

Activity XP

Activity XP is separate from skill XP. It reflects consistency: showing up, completing exercises, leaving peer feedback, keeping streaks alive. Your overall activity level appears on the leaderboards.