// Story brainstorming capture: minimal notes that preserve creative freedom. Use when exploring narrative ideas, discussing characters, planning chapters, or thinking through story possibilities.
Prose-level immersion patterns for narrative fiction. Use when writing or revising prose: the sentence-level and paragraph-level craft that pulls readers into the story. Project-specific voice comes from style files passed alongside this skill.
Adversarial reading methodology for narrative fiction: find what doesn't work, not confirm what does. Focus-area driven with dedicated resources per area. Use when reviewing drafts, evaluating prose quality, or assessing changes at any stage.
Arc structure, narrative design, and pacing at multiple scales: saga, arc, chapter, scene. Use when structuring story at any level, planning arcs, designing chapter outlines, or evaluating whether narrative structure serves the story's goals.
Team composition for writing workflows: which agents to spawn, how many, what focus areas to assign, and how to scale effort. Use when composing critic panels, dispatching researchers, staffing draft/revise loops, or setting up brainstorm fan-outs.
Logging and referencing writing issues: craft problems, tics, inconsistencies, and structural concerns found during analysis, critique, or review. Use when an agent identifies something worth tracking beyond a single critique report: repeated tics across chapters, inconsistencies that affect multiple scenes, structural problems that need the author's attention, or patterns that should be fixed in revision.
Load when producing any written artifact for humans.
| name | brainstorming |
| type | reference |
| description | Story brainstorming capture: minimal notes that preserve creative freedom. Use when exploring narrative ideas, discussing characters, planning chapters, or thinking through story possibilities. |
| model-invocable | true |
Capture story brainstorming as minimal working notes that preserve creative freedom. The core principle: record what was stated, mark what was suggested, and don't fill gaps the author left open.
When producing a standalone brainstorm document, tag all generated content
as <AI> since none came from the author:
# [Topic]: [Angle]
## Approach
<AI>What direction you explored and why.</AI>
## Ideas
<AI>Concrete possibilities, organized logically.</AI>
## Tradeoffs
<AI>What each option gains and gives up.</AI>
## Connections
<AI>How this connects to existing story threads.</AI>
## Open Questions
<AI>Questions the author should consider before committing.</AI>
Default: untagged text = the author said it. Most brainstorming content comes from the author, so untagged is the common case.
Three tags for special context:
<AI>...</AI>: AI suggestions and possibilities. Use when offering ideas the author didn't state. Keep brief: 2-3 options, not exhaustive lists.
<hidden>...</hidden>: Author-only information for planned reveals. Secret motivations, future twists, behind-the-scenes reasoning that readers and characters don't know yet.
<rejected>...</rejected>: Ideas explicitly considered and discarded. Recording why something was rejected prevents re-suggesting it and preserves the reasoning for later reconsideration.
Record what the author stated. Don't elaborate, don't fill gaps, don't invent details they didn't mention.
AI suggestions are valuable: wrap them in <AI> tags and keep them brief.
<AI>Tournament? Political? Trial?</AI>If the author left it vague, the notes stay vague. "Might," "maybe," "thinking about," "something like": all preserved as-is. Vagueness isn't a problem to solve; it's creative space the author is keeping open.
Multiple contradictory options coexist until the author chooses. Don't resolve them. Don't pick the "best" one.
Use whatever structure fits the discussion: bullet lists, topic sections, timeline format, question-driven, freeform. The goal is clarity, not template compliance.
Essential elements:
<AI> tags<hidden> tags<rejected> tags when relevantAll brainstorming types share the core principles above. See resources for specialized guidance:
resources/chapter-planning.md: beat and scene exploration, pacing thoughts, chapter structureresources/character-development.md: motivations, arcs, relationships, voiceresources/worldbuilding.md: systems, cultures, geography, loreresources/continuity-timeline.md: chronology, contradictions, knowledge propagationRead the relevant resource when the brainstorming focuses on that area.
The success check: the author says "yes, that's what I said." Capture stated facts, preserve uncertainty, add brief tagged options when useful, keep notes minimal.
See the writing-artifacts skill for directory conventions and naming. Durable decisions get promoted to the kb decisions layer after the brainstorm completes.