prose-craft

What this skill does

# Fiction Prose Craft

Practical guardrails for writing fiction. Each rule is a thing that goes wrong
in drafts — especially AI-assisted drafts — and how to fix it.

## Prose Craft

**Show, don't name the sensation.** "Her hands were shaking" not "she felt
afraid." The reader should infer the emotion from the physical detail. When you
name the emotion directly, you shortcut the reader's experience of it. The
physical detail makes them feel it; the label just tells them about it.

> Before: She felt a surge of grief.
> After: She opened the cabinet and his coffee mug was still there, handle turned out the way he always left it.

**Concrete and sensory.** Name the object, the sound, the texture. "The
fluorescent light buzzed" not "the room felt sterile." Abstraction is the
default mode of lazy prose. Every time you reach for an adjective like "eerie"
or "beautiful," ask what specific sensory detail would make the reader reach
that conclusion on their own.

**Vary sentence rhythm.** Short sentences for impact, longer for texture. Three
short sentences in a row creates urgency. A long sentence after them releases
it. Read the paragraph aloud — if it drones, the rhythm is flat. This isn't a
rule about sentence length. It's a rule about pacing.

> The door opened. He stepped in. The room was empty. She'd taken everything —
> the books, the lamp, the framed photograph from their trip to the coast that
> he'd always assumed meant as much to her as it did to him.

**No purple prose, no cliches.** "Her eyes were pools of liquid sapphire" is
not prose, it's decoration. Precision matters as much here as in technical
writing — it's just applied to different material. If a phrase sounds like
you've read it a hundred times before, you have, and so has the reader.

**Cut adverbs that duplicate the verb.** "She whispered quietly" — the verb
already did that work. "He sprinted quickly" — what else would sprinting be?
Adverbs earn their place only when they contradict or modify: "she whispered
fiercely" does real work because it creates tension between the quietness of
whispering and the intensity of the delivery.

## Dialogue Craft

**Distinct character voices.** Characters have different vocabularies, sentence
lengths, and ways of noticing the world. A physicist and a nurse describe the
same car accident differently — one talks about vectors and impact force, the
other about the angle of the victim's arm and whether the breathing was
shallow. If you can swap dialogue lines between characters and nobody notices,
the voices aren't distinct enough.

**Subtext over statement.** Characters rarely say exactly what they mean. The
gap between what's said and what's meant is where tension lives. "I'm fine"
from a character who clearly is not fine does more narrative work than a
paragraph of internal monologue explaining their emotional state.

> Before: "I'm really angry that you didn't tell me about the diagnosis," she said.
> After: "So when were you going to mention it?" She lined up the salt and pepper shakers until they were exactly parallel. "Or was that on someone else's list?"

**No "As You Know, Bob" exposition.** If a character explains something, they
need a reason to explain it, and the other character needs a reason to listen.
Two scientists don't explain basic physics to each other. A parent doesn't
narrate their child's life history to them at dinner. If you need the reader to
know something, find a context where the explanation is natural — a newcomer, a
misunderstanding, a teaching moment.

**Dialogue tags: "said" is invisible.** "Exclaimed," "opined," "mused,"
"interjected" — these draw attention to the author, not the character. The
reader's eye skips over "said" and stays in the scene. Use fancy tags only when
they genuinely add information that context doesn't already provide, which is
almost never.

**Physical beats over attribution.** A physical action between dialogue lines
grounds the scene in space and does double duty. "She set down the coffee cup"
tells you where they are and gives the conversation a physical rhythm. It does
more work than "she said angrily" because it shows the anger (or the
composure, or the distraction) instead of naming it.

> "I don't think this is going to work." He turned the pen over in his fingers, clicked it twice. "Not the way you want it to."

## Scene Structure

**Enter late, leave early.** Start the scene as close to the conflict as
possible. Don't show characters arriving, sitting down, ordering coffee,
exchanging pleasantries before the conversation that matters. The reader
doesn't need the establishing shot — they'll orient themselves. Same at the
end: once the scene's turn has happened, get out. The lingering goodbye is
almost always fat to trim.

**Every scene needs tension.** Even quiet scenes. Tension doesn't require
shouting or explosions. It can be internal — a character deciding whether to
open an envelope. Interpersonal — two people who disagree about something
small that represents something large. Situational — a ticking clock, a
narrowing set of options. If a scene has no tension at all, it's not a scene,
it's a transition, and transitions should be one sentence, not three pages.

**End on a turn.** Something has changed by the end of the scene. A new piece
of information arrived. A decision was made. A relationship shifted, even
slightly. If nothing changed, the scene may not need to exist. The turn
doesn't have to be dramatic — "she realized she'd been wrong" is a turn. "They
kept talking about the same thing and neither changed their mind" is not.

## AI-Fiction Failure Modes

These are the patterns that show up reliably when AI writes or co-writes
fiction. Knowing them makes them easier to catch and fix.

**Don't resolve ambiguity too early.** If a question is meant to haunt the
reader, let it haunt. AI tends to tie up loose ends because it pattern-matches
toward resolution — toward the most probable next token, which is often the
tidy answer. Good fiction tolerates discomfort. Not every question needs an
answer in the chapter it's raised.

**Don't flatten characters into one voice.** Different people process the same
event differently. A pragmatist and a philosopher watching the same sunset have
different interiorities — one thinks about when to leave, the other about the
nature of color perception. If all your characters narrate in the same
register, they're not characters, they're the model's default voice wearing
different name tags.

**Don't explain science at the reader.** Dramatize it through character action
and consequence. If a character understands Kolmogorov complexity, they act on
that understanding — they make a decision, they notice a pattern, they build
something. They don't stop the plot to deliver a lecture. The reader learns
what the concept means by watching it matter to someone.

> Before: "Kolmogorov complexity," Dr. Chen explained, "is the length of the shortest computer program that produces a given output. It tells us about the fundamental compressibility of information."
> After: Chen stared at the sequence. Too short. No structure she could see, no repeating motif — but the file was four kilobytes, not four hundred. Something was compressing it, and she didn't know what.

**Don't write emotional stage directions.** "She felt a wave of sadness wash
over her" is the fiction equivalent of a screenwriter's parenthetical.
Instead, show what sadness looks like from inside: what the character notices
(the crack in the ceiling she's never seen before), what they fail to notice
(that someone asked them a question), how their body behaves (she realized
she'd been holding the phone for ten minutes without dialing).

**Don't open with a setting camera pan.** "The laboratory was a cavernous
space filled with humming equipment and the faint smell of ozone" — this is a
movie establishing shot, not prose. Start with a person doing something. Let
the setting emerge from what the characte