Your manuscript knows things you've forgotten. The Compass analyzes what you've written and surfaces it back to you in the shape of synopses, dramatic tension scans, relationship maps, and answers to your direct questions.
We've all stepped away from a manuscript for longer than intended, and come back to it weeks or months (or years!) later to realize that we've forgotten many of its details. If you haven't experienced this, you probably aren't a writer.
The Compass is a set of writing analysis tools built into Inkwell. Each one examines the words, characters, and worlds you've created, and serves it back to you in a form you can work with: a recap, a curve, a map, an answer. All pulled directly from the words you've already written.
You put your manuscript down because of a vacation, or a career, or a new baby, or any number of other interruptions. Now you're back (yes!), the cursor is blinking, and you cannot remember how your characters got to where they are.
Synopsis analyzes any document in your project and produces a short, factual recap of what happens in it. Simply open your document, click recap, get your bearings, and get back to writing.
The skiff came in on the low tide, its hull scraped white by a reef no chart marked, and Wren was the only one awake to see it.
She meant to leave the stranger to the surf. She always meant to leave things to the surf. Instead she found herself hauling him over the rocks by the collar of a coat too fine for a drowned man, muttering his name back to him before she'd even asked it.
He woke calling for someone named Iseult, and would not say who that was.
Pacing is the hardest thing to judge when you're still "inside" your story. You're reading your manuscript one chapter at a time, in the order you wrote it, with all the intentions still attached. The shape of the thing is almost impossible to feel from that vantage point.
Heartbeat measures the dramatic tension in each document of your manuscript and plots it as a curve across the whole work. You can see the rising action, the falling action, the quiet stretches, and the places where three tense chapters sit back to back with no room to breathe. The curve becomes visible all at once, in a single view.
The curve doesn't tell you what your story should look like. Plenty of extraordinary novels take different shapes. What it tells you is what your story actually looks like right now, so that if a section feels slack, you can see whether it truly is, and exactly where.
By the time the tide turned again, half of Nitor already knew Bellamy's name, and none of them agreed on what he was.
Wren's brother came back a second time, no longer polite about it. He wanted the map, or he wanted her, and she was fairly sure he hadn't decided which.
She rowed out past the reef anyway, the same as she always had, only this time someone was rowing back.
The shape of your story: dramatic tension across your manuscript, document by document.
See where tension rises and falls across your manuscript, one read for every document.
Average tension 6.2 / 10. Peaks late, in chapters 38 through 45.
Find-and-replace can locate a word, but it cannot answer a question.
Ask lets you query your own manuscript in plain language. Did I already establish that my main character distrusts her brother? Where did I describe the harbor? How many times does the pocket watch come up before chapter nine? Ask analyzes your prose and answers from it, with a link straight to the passage so you can verify it yourself and pick up right where the evidence is.
Every answer is grounded in your manuscript and points back to the exact place it came from.
Bellamy's fever broke on the third night, and with it came the questions Wren had been too afraid to ask.
"Who is Iseult," she said, not really a question anymore. He looked at her for a long moment before he answered, and when he did, she wished she hadn't asked.
Ask a question about your story, like "did I already establish that Wren distrusts her brother" or "where did I describe the harbor." Answers are pulled from what you've actually written, with a link back to where.
Wren doesn't trust the survey office to use Bellamy's map honestly, and she trusts her brother even less once he starts asking questions on their behalf. She also hasn't forgotten that the map might be the only proof the coastline warnings were true all along. Turning Bellamy in would settle the matter quickly. Rowing him past the reef keeps the question open, which is what she wants.
Worldbuilding tools generally ask you to do the building twice. Once in the manuscript, where the story lives, and again in a separate database of entries and fields and relationship charts that you have to maintain by hand, and which starts drifting out of date the moment you stop feeding it.
Your Atlas works the other direction. It analyzes your manuscript and maps the connections it finds there: which characters appear alongside each other, how they relate, where your lore and locations tie into the story. The map is drawn from the prose itself, so it reflects the book you've actually written rather than the book you meant to write.
Your Atlas grows as your world does. Write a new character into a chapter, and they arrive on the map with the connections they've already made. Visualize your world, one piece at a time.
Grandma Maim used to say Tideglass Cove remembered everyone who ever rowed past the reef, whether the sea let them back or not.
Wren was starting to believe her.
Who and what your story connects, drawn from every character and lore entry that appears in your prose.
Connected to 6 other entries.
The Compass lives inside Inkwell, alongside your manuscript, your characters, and your world. There's nothing to configure, no separate system to maintain, no second copy of your novel to keep in sync. The analysis is always drawn from your current draft, because it's drawn from your current draft.