Your sentences.Heard clearly.

When the prose is the point

Genre fiction is often judged on whether the plot holds. Literary fiction is judged line by line. The rhythm of a sentence, the restraint in a scene of grief, the precise detail that does the work of a paragraph: these are what readers and editors notice, and they are the hardest things to judge in your own draft after the fortieth reread.

Most writing tools treat prose as a container for word count. Authrot gives you instruments for hearing it instead. None of them rewrite anything. They tell you what is on the page, so you can decide whether it is what you meant.

There are limits worth stating plainly. No count can tell you whether subtext is working, whether an image earns its place, or whether an ending is earned rather than merely quiet. Those judgments stay with you and your readers. What instruments can do is remove the guesswork from the questions that do have answers, so your rereads go to the ones that don’t.

Prose stats, measured without the AI

Every chapter has prose stats that need no model and cost nothing: reading time and read-aloud time, sentence length, dialogue share, -ly adverbs, and the words you lean on. Sentence length is the one literary writers come back to, because a chapter where every sentence is the same length reads flat however good the words are.

The words you lean on are often invisible to the writer. One novelist’s crutch is “almost”, another’s is “something like”. Seeing the list per chapter tells you whether a word is a deliberate motif or a habit, which is a judgment only you can make.

The page itself can help you read with fresh eyes. Reading mode shows just the page, and your personal view (zoom, font and size) is kept in your browser without changing the manuscript for anyone else. Many writers switch to an unfamiliar typeface for a revision pass, because a sentence that looked finished in one font can suddenly show its seams in another.

• Reading and read-aloud time
• Sentence length and dialogue share
• -ly adverbs and the words you lean on
• Measured per chapter, with no model involved

A careful reader, when you want one

Read the prose is an AI read of a chapter, with its cost shown before it runs. It reports the point of view, tense, tone, pacing and reading level, the crutch words that genuinely recur, and the strongest line, quoted back to you. It does not rewrite. Think of it as the friend who reads the chapter and tells you what they heard.

The read is kept with the chapter and knows which draft it read, so after a revision you can see it was a read of the earlier version. Writers often use it on the chapter they are least sure of, to learn whether the restraint they intended is reading as restraint or as distance.

If you would rather measure without any model, paste a passage into the voice step and it is measured in your browser for point of view, tense and style notes, at no cost. It is a quick way to check whether the opening you wrote last spring and the chapter you wrote this morning share a narrator.

Holding a voice across a whole book

Voice drift is a real risk in a book written over years. The narrator of the opening chapters, written in one season of your life, may not sound like the narrator of the ending. Voice samples give the book a reference: passages of your own that define how it should sound, and chapters that read unlike them are flagged.

If you are still finding the voice, twelve voice templates tell the same scene twelve ways, from spare and cinematic to lyrical and lush, so you can choose by ear. The literary starter in Foundations suggests close third or first person and an observant, honest tone, and offers Kishōtenketsu as its structure: four movements, with a turn rather than a conflict at the centre.

Writing without the AI

Many literary writers want no machine in their sentences, and that is a reasonable place to start. AI blackout is one switch per project: no model reads a word, no credits are spent, and every AI control leaves the screen. Prose stats, measuring your own passage, the thesaurus, history, alternates and the bible all keep working.

If you do use the assistant for anything, the text it writes is tracked through every edit, copy and branch, and writing rules (must, should, avoid and never) hold on every line it drafts. One click adds rules against stock AI phrasing. Nothing touches your text until you apply it.

Revising in layers

Literary novels are usually rewritten more than they are written. A chapter might go through a dozen passes, some for structure, some for a single image, some only to cut. The risk is losing a sentence from the fourth draft that turns out to be the one the book needed.

Authrot keeps every version of your text. Save a named version with Ctrl or ⌘ and S before a big pass, and History lets you preview any version, diff it against the one before, and restore it. Recent-edit marks in the margin show what changed lately, and clicking one gives you a word-by-word diff, which is often the fastest way to see whether a cut sentence was carrying more than you thought.

For bigger questions, such as whether the novel should open with the funeral or end with it, rewind to after any chapter and try the other shape on a branch. When you decide, merge it back, with a preview of what will change and a question for each real conflict.