Tension arc
Your manuscript’s tension across the book, drawn against the shape your structure expects.
The Tension arc draws the craft scores your documents already carry as a curve across the whole book, so you can see where the tension rises and falls. It reads the scores you have already run — it costs nothing to draw and runs no new analysis. It observes; it does not grade.
Where to find it
Open a project and choose Report in the sidebar. The Tension arc sits with the other book-shape charts, in binder order.
Score the rest
When documents are still unscored, the chart offers “Score the rest” — one action that scores every remaining document so the curve is drawn on the whole book. It tells you exactly what it will cost before anything happens — the number of documents, the credits, and roughly how long — and does nothing until you confirm. Each document is priced the same as scoring it on its own; there is no bulk rate and no hidden fan-out. You can cancel partway through, and every document already scored is kept.
How to read it
- Pick a series — switch between conflict pacing, emotional pacing, and story arc. Your choice is remembered per project.
- The target band — the shaded band is the tension your chosen structure tends to expect — a tolerance range, not a single line, because there is no exact number your midpoint should hit. A freeform project draws no band; a project with no structure set is drawn against three-act, labelled “assumed”. Short fiction draws no band at all — a short story has no act structure to plot against, so its tension is charted per story with no target shape.
- Gaps, not zeros — a document you have not scored is left as a gap in the line, never drawn as a zero — a zero would be a claim about writing that was never measured.
- Hollow points are stale — a point is hollow when its score was taken on an earlier version of that document. Re-score it to get a solid point on the current draft. Drawing the arc reads scores you already have, so it is free and unmetered; only running a fresh coaching pass to re-score a document spends credits.
- Click for coaching — select any point to read that document’s stored coaching observations and jump into the document. The observations are the coaching; the chart is how you find them.