The Conviction Engine™ — story construction and manuscript scoring software for authors.
The modelWhat the engine measures.
Every score this software produces comes from one original model of how a story turns information into action. This page sets out that model: the six stages it reads, the four states it reports, and the rule that governs the final number. It is the same model taught in the book and applied to every manuscript we score.
Origin
The Conviction Engine was developed by Platte F. Clark across three decades of ghostwriting, over the course of thirty books written for other people. It began as a working diagnosis: an explanation of why one manuscript moved readers to act and the next one, built from better material, left them admiring and unchanged.
The model is set out in full in The Conviction Engine: The Six Stages for Building Stories That Move People. This software applies that model to manuscripts. The framework, the stage definitions, the four-state scale, and the scoring rules described below are original to Platte F. Clark and Straw Dogs LLC.
The Six Stages
A story that changes behavior does six things in order. Each stage depends on the one before it, which is why the order is fixed and why a failure early costs more than a failure late.
The raw material: what happened, to whom, with what at stake. A story cannot run on material the reader doesn't have.
The order those facts arrive in, and the timing of what the reader learns when. Strong scenes in the wrong sequence spend their power before the reader can use it.
What the events add up to — the conflict, character, change, and stakes that turn a sequence of events into a point.
What the reader feels, and whether the feeling belongs to them rather than to the author describing it.
The pressure that converts feeling into intent. This is where most manuscripts stall: the room is moved, and no one has a reason to move first.
The specific thing the reader can do on Monday morning, and whether the book has made that thing obvious, available, and worth the cost.
The Four Engine States
Each stage is reported in one of four states. The scale is deliberately hard at the top: a manuscript has to earn the highest state, and most working drafts do not.
Cold
The stage isn't firing. The reader gets nothing here.
Misfire
The stage is attempted and works against itself.
Running
The stage works. It runs and drives, without power to spare.
Racing
The stage fires at full power and carries the ones around it.
How the Score Is Governed
Three rules make the overall reading honest rather than flattering. They are what keep a manuscript with two brilliant stages and one broken one from scoring as though it works.
The chain rule. A story is a chain, so the overall state never exceeds the weakest stage the book is actually attempting. Strong later stages cannot buy back an early failure, because the reader met the failure first.
The honest dial. Stage states come from the distribution of findings across the whole manuscript, chapter by chapter, rather than from an impression of the prose. A stage that scores lowest everywhere is named as the signature blind spot.
Green is earned. Only the top state reads as green. A manuscript that runs and drives is reported as running, in amber, because running is not the same as firing.
The three reader outcomes
The six stages roll up into what a reader is left with. Facts and Flow decide whether they learn. Meaning and Emotion decide whether they feel. Drive and Action decide whether they do — and because the whole engine exists to produce that last one, the reading for do mirrors the overall reading exactly.
A person reads every report
No score is delivered automatically. Every diagnostic and every report is reviewed and edited by a human at Straw Dogs Development before it reaches the author, and the manuscript is never used to train AI systems, never shared outside the studio, and deleted within 30 days of delivery.
Run It on Your Pages
Send one chapter and the engine reads it against the model above, free, with a human review before delivery. For a whole manuscript, the Conviction Engine Report scores every chapter and names the repairs in priority order.