writing-principles

What the source does

• FilesystemNone observedNo reads or writes in the source
• NetworkNone observedNo outbound calls in the source
• ShellNone observedNo commands run in the source
• DependenciesPinnedNothing floats
• SecretsNone foundNo keys in source

Five audit layers

Gates applied: no behavioural pass.

Audit 0.4.1 · source sha 915238ec14fe · 31 Oct 2026Report an issue or request a re-scan

• Publisherhaowjy GitHub userOwner of the repository this skill is read from
• Source folderhaowjy/creative-writing-skills/skills/writing-principlesThe exact folder we audited
• LicenceApache-2.0As the repository states it
• Commit pinned for this verdict915238ec14feA new audit runs when the source changes
• Repository statusNot archivedLast push 3 days ago
• Sandboxed runNot runSkills are read, not executed; layer L4 is skipped

Its description: What fiction readers want (reader reward channels) and the specific ways LLM training damages them. Load when drafting prose, critiquing, or diagnosing why a passage feels flat.

---
name: writing-principles
description: >
  What fiction readers want (reader reward channels) and the specific ways LLM training damages them. Load when drafting prose, critiquing, or diagnosing why a passage feels flat.
metadata:
  type: principle
---

# Writing Principles

## 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.

`/creative-writing-craft` carries the execution: the production modes
(`resources/prose-modes.md`), prose immersion (`resources/prose-writing.md`),
scene mechanics (`resources/scene-construction.md`), and style analysis
(`resources/style-analysis.md`).

## Resources

- [`resources/failure-modes.md`](resources/failure-modes.md): per-pattern
  deep dives with examples and fix heuristics.
- [`resources/antipatterns.md`](resources/antipatterns.md): the patterns that
  mark prose as AI-written, sorted by evidence quality; writers check a draft
  against it before handing it back, critics hunt for them.
- [`resources/citations.md`](resources/citations.md): research backing for
  the reader-reward model and documented failure modes.

Excerpt, first 5,318 characters of SKILL.md, verbatim from the audited commit. It is text from someone else’s repository, quoted so you can judge it before your agent reads it.

git clone https://github.com/haowjy/creative-writing-skills
git -C creative-writing-skills checkout 915238ec14fe

Works in

1. 2026-10-31
   ✓SAFE B 89 / 100

   first audit · source 915238ec14fe

Questions about writing-principles

• github.com/haowjy/creative-writing-skills/tree/main/skills/writi — the audited source at commit 915238ec14fe and every finding aboveObserved · 31 Oct 2026

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