Manuscript Lens
The only tool that reads your whole book at once — five lenses on the shape of the entire manuscript.
Every other tool works chapter by chapter. Manuscript Lens steps back and reads the entire book in reading order, then reports what only becomes visible from that height: who appears where, which threads are still waiting for a payoff, the habits your prose has settled into, and the words that echo too closely. The World, Prose, and Echoes lenses run entirely on your machine; the Threads lens is AI-powered— an optional reading of your story's promises and payoffs.
Manuscript Lens — the Briefing tab
- 1Open Manuscript Lens from the Review menu — the first scan runs automatically.
- 2Start on Briefing for the top-level health of the book.
- 3Move through the World, Threads, Prose, and Echoes tabs.
- 4Click any finding to jump to it — echoes, world mentions, and repeated phrases highlight the exact instance; prose findings open the chapter.
- 5Re-scan whenever the manuscript changes — a banner reminds you when it's stale.
Briefing
- A one-screen read of the book — chapters, words, tracked entities, and watched threads
- Since last scan — what got better or worse since you last looked, so revising is a loop
- Bright spots, priority findings, and a suggested revision checklist grouped by effort
- Cast insights — the strongest scene partnerships and any solo chapters
- Optional AI insights — threads asking for payoff, plus the AI reading’s strengths and cautions surfaced right in the briefing
Reading your book as…
Every book bends the rules on purpose. Tell the Lens your intent — pick from presets like lonely protagonist, ensemble cast, slow literary prose, or motif-heavy, or write your own — and it stops flagging the things you meant. A lonely-protagonist book isn't failing a connection check, and a motif isn't a repetition problem.
- Presets (or your own label) that mark whole checks — isolation, fading characters, repetition, prose habits — as deliberate
- Mark a single finding deliberate right where it appears; it stays deliberate on every future scan
- Set a whole priority class aside when it's intentional — it's remembered, and always restorable from the section footer
- Your intent is saved per book and also grounds the optional AI reading, so it judges by what you're going for
World & Prose
- World — every character, place, faction, and item, with a per-chapter presence chart and gaps
- Status flags — present, absent, missing from the page, or isolated from the rest of the cast
- Prose — book-wide crutch words and phrases, with samples you can jump to
- Both run entirely on your machine — no tokens, nothing uploaded
Threads — an AI Reading
The Threads lens is AI-powered. On top of the on-device scans, it reads your book for the story's promises and payoffs — the setups and foreshadowing you plant early, and the threads that may be left dangling. Because it uses AI, it runs as an optional pass that confirms a token cost before it starts.
- Foreshadowing and promises planted early, matched to where they might pay off
- Threads that look dangling — raised early, then left waiting for a return
- An AI pass you run when you want it; the on-device lenses work with or without it
- Uses AI Tokens, with the cost shown up front before anything runs
Echoes
The Echoes lens finds words and phrases that repeat too closely together — the kind a reader's ear snags on. Each echo is laid out on a spine showing where in the book its uses fall, ranked so the tightest repeats rise to the top. Click a dot to jump to that exact instance, and mark an echo as deliberate to keep it from being flagged again.
- Close repetitions of words, dialogue tags, and phrases, folded across inflections
- A spine that maps each occurrence to its chapter and position
- Ranked by tightness so the real snags surface first
- Hide the ones you mean as motifs; jump straight to the ones you don't
Manuscript Lens is at its best between drafts. Run it when a book is whole enough to have a shape — then let its checklist steer your next revision pass.
Muse can discuss a specific continuity concern or help plan what comes next. For a whole-book audit, it points you to Manuscript Lens rather than imitating the Lens, then helps you interpret the findings and plan the revision. Once a Lens report exists, Muse can read its latest saved local findings and its optional AI insight, then connect them to saved Chapter Analysis and Pulse reports where that helps.