Every scene has a pace and a weight. Plot them on a curve, and problems that are invisible on the page — a flat second act, a climax that arrives too early — become obvious at a glance.
Try Murasaki freeTag each chapter’s Phase, Scene Type, Pace, and Technique as you write — Murasaki turns those tags into a live chart of your novel’s tension and pace, chapter by chapter. No separate spreadsheet, no redrawing it by hand every time you move a scene.
The chart updates the moment you reorder chapters on the corkboard, so restructuring your plot and watching its shape change happen in the same place.
Murasaki includes reference curves for common genre shapes (tragedy, Bildungsroman, hero’s journey, and others), plus real tension curves mapped from 45 published novels across genres — so you can see whether your second act sags compared to a book you admire, not just compared to an abstract template.
This isn’t a rule that says your novel is wrong if it doesn’t match — it’s a reference point. Some of the best-loved books ignore the “typical” curve entirely. The point is to make that a deliberate choice, not an accident you can’t see.
Plenty of writers already plot tension on paper or in a spreadsheet — it works, until the plot changes. Move one chapter in Murasaki and the curve redraws itself; in a spreadsheet, you’re re-entering values by hand, and on paper you’re starting over.
Because the curve is generated from the same Phase/Scene Type/Pace tags you’re already using to organize the book, there’s no second system to maintain in parallel with your actual manuscript.
No — the chart plots whatever chapters have tags. Untagged chapters just don’t contribute a data point yet, so you can add the Story Arc layer gradually as you go, not all at once before you start.
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