Built by a novelist.
For novelists.

I was using Muse on one of my own novels. I'd just built the Character Arc Builder, so I ran it on my protagonist — the same character I'd been writing for six months.

A few questions in, the conversation turned uncomfortable.

The Arc Builder doesn't write anything. It just asks. Who is this person? What does he want? What's he afraid of, underneath the want? Why does he believe what he believes? As I answered, I started seeing my own answers — and where they no longer matched the protagonist on the page.

There was no moment I had decided to. He'd simply been slowly losing his shape, scene by scene, while I focused on plot, pace, and the next chapter's hook. The depth was still in the back of my head somewhere. It just wasn't reaching the page anymore. I'd been writing the version I could still hold while moving, but it had become thinner than the one I'd set out to write. A part of me felt secure, because all my intentions had been recorded in my support documents. Surely that's all you need, right? No.

Every writer who works on a long book has seen this. The depth you start with gets traded for something shallower because the book outgrows the part of your mind that can hold it all at once. And what's worse, your bible becomes a stale set of loose documents you rarely consult anyways. You don't decide. It just happens, scene by scene, month by month.

That's what Muse is built to fix. It reads everything you write and never forgets. It holds the depth you can't carry while you're writing the next page. And it tells you, gently, when you're drifting from the book you set out to write.

For the longer story — how I went from debugging code to building a writing environment — see The Human in the Loop.