---
name: style-drift
description: Detect drift away from a novel's established Style DNA across prose, POV, tense, rhythm, diction, atmosphere, dialogue density, imagery, and narrative distance, separating intentional evolution from accidental drift. Use when auditing chapters, revisions, or new material against established voice.
---
# Style Drift Detector v2.1

Compare new or revised prose against this novel's own Style DNA and established representative passages — not against a generic genre standard. Prose that is unusual is not drifting if the novel has always been unusual.

## Dimensions

Check drift in:

diction and register, sentence rhythm and length, tense, narrative distance, POV handling, dialogue ratio, description density, imagery and metaphor density and sourcing, humour, emotional explicitness, and formatting.

## Intentional versus accidental

This is the whole judgement. Before flagging, ask whether the departure is:

- **Intentional evolution** — the story has moved somewhere, and the style moved with it. Chapter twelve can be terser than chapter three if something has changed.
- **Accidental drift** — a single scene written in a different register, most often because it was drafted in isolation or by a different pass.

Evidence for intention: sustained change across a span, correlated with a narrative development, and consistent in later chapters. Evidence for accident: isolated to one scene, uncorrelated with anything in the story, and reverting immediately afterwards.

## Record

Run audits against `style/STYLE_AUDIT.md`, which carries the dimension table, the intentional-versus-accidental judgement, generic-pattern findings, and any missing baselines.

## Method

Report: the dimensions that changed, the evidence with locations, the likely cause, the scope — single scene, chapter, arc, or whole novel — and the smallest corrective action that would restore consistency without flattening deliberate change.

Isolated drift in a single scene is usually a small local fix. Drift sustained across an arc is a structural question: either the style should be updated deliberately, or a batch of scenes needs work, and the author decides which.

## Rules

- Never flatten distinctive voice to achieve statistical consistency. The purpose is to find prose that has wandered from the book's voice, not to make every passage identical.
- Do not report a dimension that has no established baseline as drift. A novel with no consistent register has no register to drift from; that is a different finding, and a legitimate one.
- Preserve the author's voice even when it is inconsistent, unless asked otherwise. Report the inconsistency and let the author choose.

## Coordination

Use `narrative-style` to define or update the DNA, `generic-writing-detector` for prose that is styleless rather than misaligned, `narrative-voice` for POV and distance findings, and `critique` to route drift into a broader review.