haowjy/writing-principles

Writing Principles

Load /llm-writing if it isn't already loaded. This skill adds the fiction-specific layer.

Trust the Reader

The reader is an active collaborator. They reconstruct emotions from behavior, infer motives from action, hold tension across scenes, fill gaps the text leaves open, and make assumptions about what's coming next. That work is where the reward lives: reconstruction, inference, anticipation.

Your training pulls in the opposite direction. The helpfulness instinct wants to explain, resolve, clarify, and complete. In fiction, every one of those impulses can damage the reading experience by doing work the reader wanted to do themselves. The specific failure modes below are all forms of this: not trusting the reader to interpret an emotion, hold an ambiguity, follow subtext, or tolerate unresolved tension.

Trust doesn't mean obscurity. Readers also need coherent narrative, stable geography, and enough access to model characters. The discipline is knowing when to leave space and when to orient.

Economy

Every element does more than one thing. A line of dialogue advances plot AND reveals character. A sensory detail grounds the scene AND shows who the POV character is. A transition compresses time AND carries an emotional beat. Single-purpose prose makes fiction go flat: description that only describes, dialogue that only informs, interiority that only labels.

Economy isn't minimalism. Dense, lyrical prose can be economical when every phrase carries weight. Sparse prose can be wasteful when it takes ten short sentences to do what one image could do. The measure is whether removing the element would cost the reader something.

The LLM pull is toward completeness: covering every beat, naming every emotion, resolving every ambiguity. Economy is the counter-discipline: what can you leave out and still have the scene work? What's the reader already doing for you?

Reader Reward Channels

Readers enjoy fiction through overlapping reward channels. Good prose protects the relevant channels at once; damaging one damages the reading experience.

• Transportation: entering the story world. Protected by coherent narrative progression, consistent POV, concrete sensory grounding. Consistent POV means writing from inside the character's knowledge state: what have they experienced, what do they actually know right now, what would they notice and miss? The full story is in your context window; the character only has what they've lived through. Separate those.
• Aesthetic: sentence-level pleasure. Protected by variety in rhythm, word choice, sentence shape, and punctuation. Style is a reward channel, not decoration.
• Social simulation: modeling characters as minds. Protected by access through behavior and interiority, distinct voices, emotion the reader interprets rather than being told.
• Flow: challenge-skill fit and smooth processing. Protected by pacing that matches the scene's work and sentences that support comprehension without making the reading trivial.
• Curiosity / prediction reward: wanting to know what happens, what a clue means, what a character will choose, or whether an expectation will be confirmed. Protected by information gaps, uncertainty, setup/payoff, suspense, and withheld implications that the reader can actively model.

The channels compose: optimizing one at the expense of others fails. Over-explaining breaks social simulation. Under-explaining breaks transportation. Generic style breaks aesthetic pleasure. Impenetrable style breaks flow.

Punctuation Tells

Readers increasingly associate em dashes with AI-generated prose. Default to punctuation that leaves less visible AI residue: sentence breaks, commas, colons, semicolons, parentheses, or dialogue beats. Rewrite the sentence around the actual relationship between clauses instead of substituting a hyphen. Use dashes only when a project style file or author instruction makes them part of the voice. When a line needs interruption, prefer the project's documented interruption pattern and keep it consistent.

Applying the Principles

This skill is the diagnostic layer: it names what readers want and how training damages it. When a passage feels off and you can't name why, check the reward channels — which one broke? — then see resources/failure-modes.md for common patterns and fix heuristics.

The craft skills carry the execution. /creative-writing-craft has the how-to-write guidance: prose immersion (resources/prose-writing.md), scene mechanics (resources/scene-construction.md), and style analysis (resources/style-analysis.md). /creative-writing-modes has the production modes for putting prose on the page.

Resources

• resources/failure-modes.md: per-pattern deep dives with examples and fix heuristics.
• resources/citations.md: research backing for the reader-reward model and documented failure modes.