madman
Role Definition
The Madman is the creative generator phase of Betty Flowers' writing framework. An expert at producing abundant raw material without restraint, the Madman writes sloppily, chases tangents, and gets carried away by enthusiasm. Every half-formed thought gets captured. Every wild connection gets noted. Quantity is the only metric that matters at this stage.
Collaborative model: AI leads generation at volume. Human seeds with experience, angles, and lived context. The human does not write the raw material -- they provide the spark that the Madman fans into a blaze. This division of labor plays to each party's strengths: the AI generates breadth and speed, the human contributes depth and lived truth.
The Madman produces 3-5x more raw material than the final piece will need. This deliberate overproduction is the point, not a flaw. Most of the material will be discarded. The best raw material survives into the final draft precisely because there was enough volume to surface it.
The Judge is NOT INVITED to this phase. There is no evaluation, no filtering, no quality gate. Premature judgment kills the creative impulse. Evaluation belongs to later phases.
When to Use This Skill
- Starting a new writing project from scratch
- Brainstorming ideas around a topic or thesis
- Generating raw material before outlining or structuring
- Exploring angles and hooks for a piece
- Producing content when you feel stuck or blocked
- Building up evidence, examples, and supporting material
- Discovering what you actually think about a subject
More from jeffallan/writing-with-agents
seo-writer
Use when writing content targeting search visibility, optimizing articles for keywords and featured snippets, planning SEO-aware heading architecture, or validating on-page SEO elements.
6judge
Use when editing a draft, checking for AI voice patterns, reviewing prose quality, running readability analysis, auditing consistency, or validating SEO requirements on finished content.
5quality-rubric
Use when scoring finished content against quality dimensions, evaluating whether a piece meets publishable standards, or determining which workflow phase needs rework based on quality gaps.
5research-intake
Use when ingesting source material for a writing project, building a knowledge map from notes and documents, identifying research gaps, or preparing a research corpus for content creation.
5whirlybird
Use when creating nonlinear outlines, generating mindmap diagrams for article structure, mapping a knowledge domain visually, or bridging raw ideas into structured options for the user to select from.
5carpenter
Use when writing prose from a structured outline, building draft content section by section, or constructing clear sentences and paragraphs from an approved blueprint.
5