A free, private assessment that measures how ready your completed manuscript is for revision — and which parts of it need your attention first.
If you've finished a full draft and you're not sure what to tackle first, this assessment can help. It asks about the choices you've already made in your manuscript — not how it feels to you, but what's actually on the page — and turns your answers into a focused set of revision priorities.
You'll answer 24 short questions, organized into six revision categories:
Your answers are scored entirely in your browser and are never sent anywhere. No email, account, or manuscript text required. If you'd like your progress to survive a refresh, your in-progress answers are saved in this browser's local storage — you can clear them any time from the results screen.
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Category 1 of 6 · Question 1 of 24
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This assessment suggests where to focus — it isn't a professional edit or a guarantee of publication readiness. Revision is iterative; expect to revisit these categories more than once as the manuscript improves.
Your assessment shows where the manuscript needs attention. The Novel Revision Tool Kit helps you turn those priorities into an organized, scene-by-scene revision plan.
$49.99 · instant digital download
This quiz is built for writers who have finished a complete draft and are trying to figure out what to work on first. It asks specific, concrete questions about your manuscript's foundation, characters, plot, scenes, pacing, and continuity, then scores your answers to surface the three areas most likely to need attention before you start revising.
It can help you notice patterns you may already sense but haven't named: a foundation that isn't quite locked down, scenes that don't pull their weight, or pacing that flags in the middle. It can't read your manuscript, judge your prose style, or predict whether the book will sell. Treat the result as a starting point for your own judgment, not a verdict.
Developmental revision deals with the big, structural questions: does the story work, does the protagonist want something clear, does the plot hold together. Scene-level revision looks at individual scenes — their purpose, pacing, and point of view. Line editing is sentence-by-sentence polishing: word choice, rhythm, clarity. Doing them in that order saves time, since a scene you cut in developmental revision doesn't need to be line-edited at all.
Polishing prose in a scene or chapter that later gets cut or restructured is wasted effort. Structural revision tends to move, merge, or remove large chunks of text, so it's worth settling the story's foundation, plot, and character arcs before spending time perfecting individual sentences.
Yes. The six categories — foundation, character, plot, scenes, pacing, and continuity — apply across mystery, romance, fantasy, literary fiction, and everything in between. The questions are intentionally general rather than genre-specific, so they hold up regardless of what you're writing.
Yes. Nothing you enter here is uploaded, tracked, or stored on a server. Scoring happens with JavaScript running in your own browser, and your manuscript itself is never asked for or read.
Yes, as often as you'd like — after a revision pass, for a different manuscript, or just to double-check a result. Retaking clears your previous answers and starts fresh.