I built a tool to help writers study the masters — and it's free

You finish a Hemingway paragraph and think: okay, that was good. But why was it good? What exactly is he doing with sentence length, with what he leaves out, with the way the dialogue sits on the page?

That's the gap I wanted to close. So I built ProseLab.

Here's how it works:

You pick a passage — Woolf, Morrison, Carver, Tolstoy, Plath, McCarthy, and 40+ others — and the app breaks it down for you. Segments are color-coded by craft category: structure, voice, imagery, pacing. Hover over any highlight and you get a note explaining what the writer is doing and why it works.

Then you write your own version, with a hand-authored constraint to push you out of autopilot. Something like: rewrite this scene but the character can't use any direct thought — only action and sensation. Small pressure, big results.

Finally, you submit and get AI feedback on your draft.

That's the full loop: study → write → improve.

There's an activity heatmap to track your streak, Audio integration to hear your writing read aloud, and 9 categories of passages organized by craft — Dialogues, Character introduction, Tension buildup, whatever you need.

No account needed to browse. Free to use.

→ proselab.io

Would love to hear what you think — and if there are authors or passages you'd want to see added, drop them in the comments.