One book,one voice, all the way through.

What voice drift looks like

Voice is the sum of small habits: how long your sentences run and how much they vary, how often characters speak, how much the narrator interprets, which words you reach for. You don’t choose most of them consciously, which is why they drift. A chapter written fast in November sounds different from one polished in March. A co-author’s chapters have their own rhythm. A passage drafted with an AI’s help pulls toward the AI’s average.

Readers rarely name drift, but they feel it. The book seems to change narrators without changing narrators. The wry first person loses its wryness in the middle third. A tense, clipped thriller turns expository for two chapters. Editors catch it; beta readers often say only that the middle “felt slow” or “felt different”.

The hard part is that drift is invisible from inside the chapter you are writing. You need a fixed reference, and a way of comparing every chapter against it.

Samples, not descriptions

The usual way to pin down a voice is to describe it: “close third, past tense, spare, darkly funny”. Descriptions help, but they drift towards the genre’s average, because many books fit any description. A passage of the actual prose carries what a description can’t: the rhythm, the diction, the attitude, the kind of joke.

In Authrot a voice is a passage. Paste a stretch of your own writing (a long paste is measured in your browser, and the stretch most like the whole is kept), or select a passage in a chapter and use it as a voice sample. The book has one primary voice, and a chapter can name another in its plan, for a second narrator or a letter-writer. Any chapter the AI drafts or rewrites is written in that chapter’s voice, for its manner only: never its sentences, images or names.

If you can’t yet say how the book should sound, start from the twelve voice templates. Each tells the same short scene in a different voice (Spare and cinematic, Wry first person, Slow dread, Warm storyteller and more, with four for romance, romantasy, progression and cozy mystery), so you compare how it sounds, never what happens. Drop one in and change it until it is yours.

• See what the AI hears in a voice: point of view, tense, sentence length, dialogue share
• Fill the Voice notes in Foundations from the passage itself
• Measure your own passage in the browser, at no cost
• Describe this voice: the Co-writer drafts tone and style notes from your samples, price first

Measuring every chapter against the voice

Voice drift compares each chapter with its voice, using a fingerprint of the prose: sentence length and its spread, paragraph length, how much is dialogue, -ly adverbs, filter words (saw, felt, noticed), repeated sentence openings and stock AI phrasing. It is plain counting, with no model involved, so it costs nothing and gives the same answer every time.

A chapter that reads differently is listed with what changed in words you can act on (“longer sentences, more filter words”) and a table of the numbers. Fewer AI tells never counts as drift. If you have no samples yet, chapters mostly written by the AI are compared with the ones you wrote yourself instead.

For a closer look at one chapter, the free prose stats show reading and read-aloud time, sentence length, dialogue share, -ly adverbs and the words you lean on. ✦ Read the prose goes further, with point of view, tense, tone, pacing, reading level, crutch words and your strongest line.

Rules the prose is held to

Some parts of a voice are rules rather than rhythms: past tense throughout, no head-hopping inside a scene, British spelling, never “suddenly”, swearing only from one character. Writing rules hold these at four strengths: must, should, avoid and never. Every line the AI writes is held to them, and chapter readings check your chapters against them too, so a broken rule is flagged whoever broke it.

Models have habits of their own, and readers have learned to spot them. One click adds rules against stock AI phrasing: the “not X, but Y” turn (“It wasn’t fear. It was something older.”), stock words like tapestry, testament and a breath she didn’t know she was holding, a closing one-line moral, and lists of three for rhythm. New projects start with them. They make the AI’s drafts sound less like everyone else’s; they don’t make any text undetectable, and they aren’t meant to.

Too many rules make prose stilted. A handful of musts and nevers, with samples carrying the rest, usually works better than a page of instructions.

When the voice itself changes

Sometimes the drift is the discovery. Twenty chapters in, you realise the book wants to be in present tense, or darker, or funnier, and the early chapters now sound wrong. Rewriting them by hand is weeks of work; rewriting them carelessly loses what was good.

Rewrite chapters in this voice takes the chapters you tick (the drifted ones are ticked for you), an optional note like “darker, present tense”, and the price shown first. Each chapter is rewritten in the voice section by section, keeping every event, name and line of dialogue and changing how it is told. The result arrives as an alternate take of the chapter. The original is never touched: read them side by side and choose which one the book uses.

If you write every word yourself, none of this needs the AI. Samples, templates, the drift measure, prose stats and writing rules all work with AI blackout on, as a mirror for your own revision.