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Design story structure and turning points around a coherent thematic question about human experience that cannot be answered cleanly.
Install with Codex or Claude Copy this prompt, paste it into Codex, Claude, or another assistant, and let it review the skill page and install it for you.
Based on SOC occupation classification
Use this skill for requests related to web research; it provides a structured approach to conducting comprehensive web research
Load when the MainAgent is assembling a comparison report across multiple narrative-direction explorations (results from parallel/sequential task(explorer) calls). Use to compare directions along narrative, character, cost, and reader-promise dimensions. "Branches" here means narrative branches — this is NOT a git branch tool.
Plan and track a character's long-term transformation arc, ensuring each action reflects their current stage of change.
Check physical, social, and psychological plausibility in fiction scenes.
Load when WriterAgent finishes a chapter draft or is planning a chapter that should set up later payoffs. Use to embed plant-able details (objects, gestures, line drops) for ch+2 or later, and to verify earlier plants get acknowledged. Skip for the very first chapter (no prior plants exist) and for pure dialogue scenes with no narrative scaffolding.
Plan or draft scenes where rhythm, tension, and momentum matter by balancing escalation and release.
| name | thematic-depth |
| description | Design story structure and turning points around a coherent thematic question about human experience that cannot be answered cleanly. |
Use this skill when brainstorming overall structure, designing major turning points, or generating creative ideas for a story.
Every story is attempting to answer a question about human experience. Identify that question before designing plot. Scenes, conflicts, and character choices are the story's argument—each should advance or complicate the answer.
A scene can be coherent at the plot level but empty underneath. The goal is scenes that operate simultaneously at three levels:
Surface questions: Will the character survive? Will they get what they want?
Thematic questions: What does wanting this cost them? What do they discover about themselves in the act of pursuing it? What does the story know about human experience that most stories avoid?
The thematic question should be one that the story cannot answer cleanly. Clean answers produce messages. Irresolvable tensions produce meaning.
Theme appears in the conflict design, in the choices characters are forced to make, in what the story rewards and what it punishes—not in a speech where a character summarizes what the story means.
