You finished your first draft. Congratulations, seriously. Most people never get there. You closed the laptop, celebrated, and let it sit for a few weeks.
Then you opened it again. And you realized the real work was just starting.
The draft was long. Scenes wandered. A character who mattered in chapter three vanished until chapter nineteen. The middle sagged. The ending arrived too fast. You knew something was off, but “something is off” isn’t exactly actionable feedback.
So you did what most writers do. You bought a craft book. Then another. Then four more. You took a course. You highlighted things. You made notes in the margins. And when you sat back down to revise, you stared at 80,000 words and thought: where do I even start?
Kristina Stanley had exactly that problem. Her solution was a spreadsheet that eventually became a company.
A Mathematician Who Writes Murder Mysteries
Kristina Stanley holds a degree in computer mathematics. She spent twelve years at Bell Northern Research (later Nortel Networks), including stints in Tokyo and Germany. She’s the kind of person who thinks in systems.
She’s also a mystery novelist. Her debut, Descent, hit #1 on Amazon’s hot new releases list and got shortlisted for both the Crime Writers of Canada’s Unhanged Arthur award and the UK’s Crime Writers Association Debut Dagger. Her editor reportedly told her: “If every manuscript was this good, my job would be so easy.”
That manuscript wasn’t good by accident. While revising her third novel, Stanley built an Excel spreadsheet tracking every scene across dozens of structural elements: who had the point of view, what the scene goal was, where the tension peaked, what sensory details grounded the setting. She ended up with 86 columns. It was, by her own account, a monster. But it worked. She could see her story’s bones.
Her husband, watching her wrestle with this spreadsheet, made the observation that eventually launched a company: nothing like this existed as software. Writers had grammar checkers and writing platforms, but nobody had built a tool that could show you the structural anatomy of your novel, scene by scene.
The idea came in 2014. Stanley didn’t rush it. She went to writing conferences, interviewed hundreds of authors and editors about how they actually edit, and spent months building an alpha prototype. The first version of Fictionary launched in January 2018, built by Stanley, her husband Mathew (who serves as COO), and her brother.
38 Story Elements (and Why That Number Matters)
The core of Fictionary is a framework Stanley developed by analyzing what makes commercially successful fiction work. She distilled her findings into 38 Story Elements, grouped into three categories: Character, Plot, and Setting.
The Character elements track things like point of view, character goals (both external and internal), what happens if a goal fails, and how each scene impacts the protagonist’s arc. The Plot elements cover story structure (inciting incident, plot points, midpoint, climax), scene-level hooks, tension, conflict, revelations, backstory management, and pacing. The Setting elements go beyond just location to include sensory details (what the characters see, hear, smell, taste, and touch), emotional impact of the setting, and weather.
This isn’t a vague “does your story feel right?” assessment. It’s a structured checklist built from studying what actually works in published, commercially successful fiction. Each element is specific and evaluable. Does this scene have an entry hook? Is the POV character’s goal clear? Is there tension present? These are yes-or-no questions, not matters of taste.
The number 38 is deliberate. Stanley landed there after years of testing and refinement, starting from her original 86-column spreadsheet and cutting it down to the elements that consistently separated manuscripts that worked from manuscripts that didn’t.
How It Actually Works
You upload your manuscript (Word doc), and Fictionary breaks it into chapters and scenes automatically. It identifies your characters, maps point-of-view shifts, and calculates word counts per scene. From there, you work through each scene evaluating it against the 38 Story Elements.
Some of this the software handles for you. It auto-detects characters, generates a story arc visualization, and creates a Story Map that gives you a bird’s-eye view of your entire manuscript. You can see, at a glance, which scenes lack clear goals, where tension drops, or where your protagonist disappears for too long.
The Story Arc visualization is worth pausing on. Fictionary draws your manuscript’s actual narrative arc and overlays it against the recommended arc for commercial fiction. You can see immediately if your inciting incident lands too late, if your middle sags, or if your climax arrives without enough buildup. It’s like getting an X-ray of your story’s structure, and it shows problems that are almost impossible to spot when you’re reading your own work linearly.
In total, the software generates 15 different visual insights. The Story Map alone can reveal issues like inconsistent POV usage, scenes without conflict, or settings that never get grounded with sensory detail.
The AI component is optional and additive. When you turn it on, it evaluates each scene against the key Story Elements and gives you feedback on whether the scene meets structural benchmarks for things like tension, conflict, and goal clarity. Importantly, the AI shows its reasoning, so you can decide whether you agree with its assessment. It’s positioned as a second opinion, not a verdict.
And to be clear about what Fictionary’s AI does not do: it doesn’t write for you. Not a sentence, not a paragraph, not a scene. It doesn’t suggest plot ideas or generate dialogue. This is purely an analytical tool. You write the novel. Fictionary helps you see what you built.
The Editing Tool That Doesn’t Try to Be a Writing Tool
Most AI tools in the fiction space are racing to help you write. Fictionary is running in the opposite direction. Its entire value proposition is what happens after you write, when you have a draft and need to figure out what’s working.
That distinction is Fictionary’s defining characteristic. In a market full of tools offering to draft your scenes, brainstorm your plot, or roleplay as your characters, Fictionary sits in a lane almost entirely its own: structural manuscript analysis. It treats editing not as a vague, intuition-driven process but as something that can be systematic without being mechanical.
For authors who’ve tried to self-edit and felt lost, that structure is the whole point. The 38 Story Elements give you a vocabulary for talking about what’s wrong with a scene. “This scene doesn’t work” becomes “this scene has no entry hook, the POV character’s goal is unclear, and the tension drops in the middle.” That’s a problem you can actually fix.
StoryTeller vs. StoryCoach
Fictionary offers two main product lines. StoryTeller is built for authors editing their own work. StoryCoach is built for freelance editors and writing coaches who edit other people’s manuscripts.
StoryCoach includes everything in StoryTeller plus features designed for client work: support for up to 20 client manuscripts, professional editing reports, and the tools needed to deliver structural edits efficiently. Stanley uses StoryCoach for her own editorial practice, and Fictionary runs a certification program for editors who want to formalize their structural editing skills.
For most authors reading this, StoryTeller is the relevant product. The Premium tier adds support for up to 10 manuscripts (versus 3 on the standard plan), track changes, commenting, and series creation tools.
Who This Is For (and Who It Isn’t)
Fictionary is best suited for authors who have a completed draft and want to improve it structurally before sending it to a professional editor or publishing. It’s especially useful for newer authors who haven’t yet internalized story structure instinctively, and for anyone writing complex fiction (multiple POV characters, subplots, series) where keeping track of structural elements across a full manuscript gets unwieldy.
If you’re a pantser who’s finished a draft and can feel that something is wrong but can’t articulate what, Fictionary’s framework could be genuinely clarifying.
It’s not the right tool if you’re still writing your first draft and need help getting words on the page. It’s not a replacement for a human developmental editor, though it could make your editor’s job easier (and save you money) by catching structural issues before the manuscript lands on their desk. And it won’t help with prose-level concerns like grammar, word choice, or sentence rhythm. Pair it with ProWritingAid or a similar tool for that layer.
The learning curve is real but manageable. The 38 Story Elements take time to learn, and working through a full manuscript scene by scene is a commitment. Fictionary provides tutorials and video guides to ease you in, but don’t expect to upload a manuscript and get instant clarity. This is a tool that rewards the work you put into it.
The Bottom Line
Fictionary exists because a mathematician who writes murder mysteries got frustrated with spreadsheets and built something better. It’s opinionated software in the best sense: it has a clear point of view about what makes stories work structurally, and it gives you a systematic way to evaluate your own manuscript against that framework.
It won’t write your book. It won’t even tell you what to write next. What it will do is show you the architecture of your story (where the load-bearing walls are, where the foundation is cracking, where you forgot to put in a window) so you can make informed decisions about revision.
For authors who treat editing as a craft worth learning, not just a box to check before publishing, that’s a genuinely useful thing.
