Paste a scene. In a minute or two, you'll know where it loses force, and what to try first.

Every writer knows the moment. The pages are done, something is wrong, and the people who could tell you what are busy, kind, or both. Boffo reads your pages the way a good story editor would, and it tells you plainly what it finds. Here are twelve things worth knowing about it.

1. 1. It reads for the machinery, not the commas. Boffo asks what changes in a scene, what stands in the character's way, and who knows what, and when. Line edits can wait. These are the questions that decide whether a reader turns the page.
2. 2. It picks its own tools. Boffo carries fourteen engines, each built to answer one question about story. It reads your pages first, then chooses the two or three your text most needs.
3. 3. It shows its evidence. Every diagnosis points back to your own lines, so you can check it against your pages and decide for yourself.
4. 4. It knows a flaw from a choice. Boffo does not reduce fiction to a formula. It does not demand three acts, a romance, constant conflict or a happy ending, and it will not call a deliberate departure a mistake.
5. 5. It weighs a fix before you make it. Asked to revise, Boffo says what a change would gain, what it would lose, and what it might break elsewhere in the story.
6. 6. It asks before it assumes. A reading ends with no more than two questions for you, and only when your answer would change the advice.
7. 7. It keeps the conversation going. Answer its questions, ask your own, or send it back for another pass with different engines. In the live demo, each reading allows three follow-ups.
8. 8. It can be gentle, or not. Standard mode is even-handed. Harsh mode puts the biggest problem first and skips the cushioning. It changes how Boffo says it, never what Boffo finds.
9. 9. It comes from the classics. Boffo is built on Robert McKee's Story, Albert Zuckerman's Writing the Blockbuster Novel, and John Truby's work on genre and story worlds, turned from books you read into questions Claude can ask of your pages.
10. 10. It was built by a writer. Aaron Michael made Boffo from his own study of the craft, and he uses it on his own fiction. The study notes behind it are open to read in Story Techniques.
11. 11. PRICE. The Boffo skill is free to use and to share. It runs in Claude, and you can have it by filling in the form below. The live demo on this site is open by invitation while it is new.
12. 12. The name. Boffo is old show-business jargon for a big hit. Aaron came across it in 2010 while shopping his science-fiction screenplay Stellanova around Los Angeles, and he kept it.