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 — the reconstruction, the inference, the anticipation — is where the reward lives.

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.