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?

Four Reward Channels

Readers enjoy fiction through four separable channels. Good prose protects all four at once; damaging any 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: readable challenge. Protected by pacing that matches the scene's work, sentences that support comprehension.

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

The craft skills carry the execution: /prose-writing for immersion patterns (psychic distance, rhythm, sensory grounding, interiority) and /scene-construction for how scenes work on the page (entry, dialogue, pacing, transitions).

This skill's job is the diagnostic layer. When a passage feels off and you can't name why, check the four channels: which one broke? Then see resources/failure-modes.md for common patterns and fix heuristics.

Resources

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