The analysis tools

Sixteen views on the book you have actually written, as opposed to the one you meant to. None of them grades you. Each answers one question and says which.

Every tool explains itself in the inspector on the right, in three parts: what it is, how to read it, and what to do about what it says. What follows is the same, gathered in one place.

Supported and experimental

The menu marks some tools experimental. This is a promise, not a warning about quality: a supported tool is one whose bug reports get answered; an experimental one is offered without that undertaking. Writing Goals and the Corkboard are supported. The rest are labelled experimental, and are all fully reachable.

A rough tool you were told to expect is worth exploring. The same tool presented as finished is a defect — the difference is entirely in what it was called.

Structure and shape

Corkboard

Every scene as an index card, in reading order, with its summary and status. The board is the book at arm's length. Drag to reorder. A run of cards you cannot summarise is usually a run to cut.

Spine Report

What arrives and leaves at each chapter, one row per chapter. Front and back matter don't appear — only chapters with a place in the book's own numbering do.

Arc beats are the beats you've placed on a chapter in Plot Board — dragging a beat onto a column there is what sets the chapter this report reads. A beat that only touches a chapter through its linked scene, without ever being dropped on a column of its own, doesn't count here.

Threads opening and closing means plot items with an introduced or resolved position set — not story arcs, and not every thread Loose Ends would flag. A thread with no position anywhere is invisible to this report even though Loose Ends still finds it; that's a deliberate division of labour, not a gap, but it means a chapter that looks quiet here can still be sitting on a loose end Loose Ends already knows about. Threads held is the running total — everything opened so far minus everything closed, chapter by chapter.

Scenes missing beats counts a scene the moment it's short even one of its six narrative beats — Hook, Setup, Trigger, Wrangle, Action, Climax, the same six the Scene Grid tracks — not only scenes with none filled in at all.

Click a chapter, an arc-beat chip, or a thread chip to open the record behind it. A chapter with a rising open count and no beats of its own is a chapter doing nothing but bookkeeping.

Structure

How this manuscript is actually shaped against the beats of the structure you've chosen for it — not a template to fill in, a ruler to measure a finished draft against.

Structure lives in the sidebar's Story Bible section now, not Analysis — its documentation stays on this page because the tool itself hasn't changed, only where you launch it from.

Choosing a structure. Structure is a setting on the manuscript, not the project — open the tool with a manuscript active in the "Working on" picker, and if none is chosen yet you'll see a chooser instead of a chart. The same chooser is offered directly in the New Manuscript sheet when you create a book, so a structure can be picked, built or imported before the manuscript even exists rather than waiting until afterward. Ten built-in shapes ship with the app, deliberately the older, common-property ones rather than named commercial systems:

Click a card to select it. Change your mind later from the ⋯ menu in the tool's own header — it can switch to a different structure, or Stop using a structure to go back to the chooser.

Building your own. Every beat is positioned as a percentage through the finished book, not a fixed word count or chapter — the same structure fits a short book and a long one without rescaling. To build a custom structure, choose New structure… from the chooser or the ⋯ menu, or start from an existing one with Duplicate…. In the editor:

1. Name it, and optionally add a one-sentence summary and a words-per-page figure — used only to turn word targets into page targets.
2. Add a beat with Add a beat: give it a name, an optional note describing what happens there, and a Starts at __% position.
3. Turn on Spans to if the beat covers a stretch of the book rather than a single moment, and set where it ends.
4. Repeat for as many beats as the structure needs. Beats always sort by their percentage, not by the order you added them — there's no drag-to-reorder, because there's nothing to reorder: move a beat by changing its percentage.

Built-in structures are editable in place too — disagreeing with a shipped structure is usually a correct read of your own book, not a mistake. Only a structure you created yourself can be deleted; editing a built-in just changes your own copy of it.

Exporting and importing. Any structure — built-in or your own — can be shared as a .beatsheet file: Export Structure… from the ⋯ menu writes one, and Import Structure…, from the same menu or the New Manuscript sheet, reads one back in. An imported structure is saved into this Mac's own structure library the same way a hand-built one is, so it shows up in the chooser for every project afterward, not just the one it was imported into.

Reading the chart. Each beat gets a dashed line at the word count the structure expects it, labelled with the beat's name — word and page targets come from the manuscript's target word count (set right in the tool's header) times the beat's percentage. Tell Sgeulai where a beat actually landed with Set actual… on that beat's row, and a line is drawn from the target back to your real chapter: orange running right means the beat arrived late, purple running left means it arrived early, green means it's within the two-thousand-word tolerance either way, and grey means you haven't placed it yet. Three beats late by the same amount means a front-heavy book, not three misplaced beats.

Beats the draft hasn't reached yet simply have nowhere to land — that isn't a finding, just a book still being written. The same ⋯ menu's Build chapters from "…"… runs the opposite direction, turning a structure's own beats into an outline of scenes and chapters, for starting a book from the shape rather than measuring one already written.

Pacing

Chapter and scene lengths against this book's own usual range. The green band is normal for this book; bars outside it are the unusual ones. Long is not wrong — it only says which ones differ.

This is about length, not difficulty — how long a section runs next to the rest of the book. For how a passage actually reads, sentence by sentence, see Readability in The writing inspector instead.

Plot and threads

Plot Board

A grid of plot lines against chapters. Each row is a plot line, each column a chapter, each card a beat. Drag beats between chapters. Turn on Compact to see the whole book at once, and Tension for the intensity curve. Gaps in a row are chapters where that thread goes quiet.

Loose Ends

Setups with no payoff: every plot item introduced at a chapter but never resolved, plus arcs with no climax and items waiting on something still open. Answer each row where it sits — say which chapter pays it off, mark it deliberately open, or open the record.

Marking something intentionally open is a real answer, not a way of silencing the report. A thread you left open on purpose stops being a finding.

Cast Grid

Every character's line through the book, side by side. Rows are characters, columns are this manuscript's structure beats. Read across the protagonist's row for the plot; read down a column to see who is doing nothing while it happens. A row that is blank until the climax is a character the book forgot.

Scenes

Five C's

Whether each scene and arc answers the five questions — characters, circumstances, conflict, choices, consequences. A filled mark means recorded, hollow means missing, and the emptiest records sort to the top.

The useful reading is negative: conflict and consequences but no choice means things happen to someone. Fill in… opens the five questions directly.

Scene Grid

Every scene's shape in one table, in reading order — no sorting or filtering, just a straight read through the manuscript, plus two charts of the value shift across it.

Goal, conflict, the turning point, crisis choice and outcome are the same fields Five C's asks about, phrased as different questions — fill one in and the other sees it too, though Five C's never looks at the crisis choice and Scene Grid does. A blank cell here is fillable in place: click it to open a small editor without leaving the grid. A filled cell is read-only from the grid itself — double-click the row to open the full scene record instead.

The six narrative beats — Hook, Setup, Trigger, Wrangle, Action, Climax — are a separate set, filled the same inline way, and are what Spine Report's "missing beats" count reads.

Value shift is two things: the scene's emotional value before and after, in your own words, and a numeric charge — before and after, -2 to +2 — the two charts at the top are built from: a cumulative line for the book as a whole and a bar per scene, green for a positive shift, orange for negative, grey for flat. Both live on the scene's own record, in its Emotional Arc section; the same charge fields, for the story's own line rather than the character's, are in Story Value right below it — see Scene in The Story Bible. A scene with neither charge set simply reads as flat, not broken. A column of blanks in goal, conflict or outcome is still a column worth filling — that reading doesn't depend on the charts.

Who, where and when

Character Arc

Which characters appear in which scenes. Rows are characters, columns are scenes; a dot is present, a star is point of view. Detect Appearances fills the grid from your prose. Look for a character who vanishes for forty scenes, or two who never share one.

Relationship Graph

Who and what is connected to who and what. Nodes are records; lines are relationships you drew, wikilinks in your prose, and the links events and objects already carry — participants, places, causes, owners. Drag nodes to arrange them and the layout is remembered.

Timeline

The same events on two clocks: story time and reading order. Detect Dates reads dates out of the prose. Where the two clocks disagree you have a flashback — deliberate or not.

Its Braid tab plots the same idea for a braided structure specifically: each chapter's real date against its place in the book, connected in reading order. The line zigzags backward exactly where the manuscript flashes back — the shape of your own braid, at a glance.

Its Visual tab can also draw a band of real-world events beneath the story's own ruler — a research timeline you import, type in by hand, or have an AI help you build. See History.

Prose and process

Voice Check

Whether the prose still sounds like you. Sentence length, rhythm and word habits measured against your own baseline; outliers are passages that drift from it. A drift after an AI edit is the thing this exists to catch.

AI Readings

Things the analysis thinks about your book, waiting for a yes or no. See Reading the manuscript with AI.

Name Registry

Real names against the names in the manuscript, one row per person, with what they are called in each book. Keeps a memoir's anonymisation consistent, and catches the same person named two ways.

The registry is the mapping; Apply Pseudonyms to Prose… and Restore Real Names in Prose… (in the manuscript's own menu) are what actually rewrite the manuscript text from one side to the other, so you can draft under real names and swap to pseudonyms only when you're ready to send it out — and swap back just as cleanly.

Writing Goals

Two kinds of target, kept in different places. A daily word goal and, if you set one, a deadline, both live on this tool itself and apply across every manuscript and project you open — they aren't scoped to whichever book is active. A target word count and target date per chapter, and a target word count per scene, belong to that chapter or scene: set them inline in a chapter's own row here, in bulk with Set Targets…, or for a scene, in its own Metadata tab in the writing inspector.

The shortfall reads like "words to write today," but it's really a whole-manuscript figure: everything still owed across chapters with a target, divided by your daily goal, rounded up to an estimated finish date — a flat projection, with no allowance for weekends or for days you've already run ahead or behind. Once every chapter with a target has met it, the tool says the manuscript's complete rather than estimating a date that no longer means anything.

Colour doesn't mean quite the same thing everywhere in the app, so it's worth knowing which scheme you're looking at. Most progress bars — the manuscript-wide bar at the top of this tool, a scene's bar in the writing inspector's Metadata tab, and the live count in the editor's own status bar — are simple: blue while short, green once you've met the target. Chapter rows here, and the "Chapter Progress" box on the writing inspector's Readability tab, use a four-stage ramp instead: red under 40%, yellow 40–74%, blue 75–99%, green at 100% or over. Either scheme adds a diagonal stripe across the bar once you go over target, since a full bar alone can't tell 100% from 140%.

Red also means "empty" outside of progress bars — an unset chapter target, or a deadline you haven't set, shows in red until you fill it in. Once a deadline is set it turns green, then orange once the date has passed.

There is no streak, no notification and no celebration for hitting a goal — nothing about your writing is tracked day to day beyond what's visible here. The daily goal exists for exactly one purpose: turning "words remaining" into an estimated finish date.

From the browsers

Two more planning tools, reached from a Story Bible browser's own toolbar rather than the tool palette above — not counted in the sixteen, but answering the same kind of question.

Character Balance Sheet

A cast-wide grid of fifteen positive and fifteen negative traits, one column per character, scored and banded from "too weak" to "too strong." Select one character first and it opens as a single centred profile instead of the grid. Reached from Character Balance… in the Characters browser.

Evidence Board

Which events are backed by a citation, and which are thin or unsourced — this app's usual gap-flagging idiom applied to fact-checking, for memoir and history work with real sources behind them. Reached from Evidence Board… in the Events browser.