Roadmap

Overview

The Roadmap is one of Story Stream’s most powerful features, designed to help authors see the forest, not just the trees. It organizes high-level feedback across your manuscript and turns it into a clear, actionable revision plan. The Roadmap is divided into two views:

Story-Wide Feedback

Story-wide feedback highlights recurring or structural issues that span multiple chapters (like theme execution, character arcs, or structural pacing).

Chapter-Specific Feedback

In addition to high-level Story-Wide Feedback, Story Stream also offers chapter-specific guidance across every core area of craft. This view helps you pinpoint exactly where in your manuscript a particular issue occurs, whether it’s a stretch of sluggish pacing, emotionally flat dialogue, or a dropped thematic thread.

Chapter Heatmap

The chapter heatmap is a powerful visual tool that shows you how your manuscript scores on each analysis across every chapter:

Each cell represents a specific analysis in a specific chapter. The color-coded system quickly tells you where things are working well and where you might want to dig deeper. To learn about how we do scoring, see the Scoring page.

Click on any highlighted cell to go directly to that feedback and view:

Individual Feedback Items

Each feedback item is sourced from Story Stream’s deep analytic reports, Pacing, Dialogue, Character, Theme, Antagonist, Genre, and more. These insights are distilled and curated into a unified revision path. What makes this feature different from anything else is its specificity, clarity, and utility. Every item includes:

• Problem Detail: A focused explanation of what’s not working, referencing specific patterns, scenes, or analysis types.
• Reader Impact: Why it matters. This section ties the issue to the actual reader experience, clarity, tension, immersion, empathy.
• Recommendations: Targeted, genre-aware editorial suggestions to guide revision.
• Ideas: A hallmark of Story Stream’s approach. These are concrete, context-aware revision ideas generated from your actual manuscript. They’re not generic prompts, they’re creative, grounded, and designed to spark forward motion.

Whether you're revising plot, sharpening character motivations, or deepening emotional payoff, the Roadmap helps you prioritize what's most meaningful, backed by a system that understands both your story and your genre.

Example Feedback Structure

Here's the collection of roadmap items for a manuscript:

Here’s a real example of how each individual issue is presented: