Writing Skills for Claude Code

A Claude Code plugin with specialized skills for fiction and narrative nonfiction authors.

Session Continuity

Book projects span weeks or months, and Claude has no memory between sessions. All three skills now treat the project's blueprint or Story Bible as persistent state: read it at session start, update it when foundations change, and write a short note to sessions/YYYY-MM-DD_topic-slug.md at session end. The prose-mechanics skill uses a per-project audit tracker the same way.

Skills Included

Fiction Workshop

Collaborative fiction writing and editing with 5 editorial personas:

• Developmental Editor - Plot, pacing, structure, stakes
• Line Editor - Prose rhythm, word choice, "show don't tell"
• Character Consultant - Voice consistency, motivation, arc
• Continuity Tracker - Timeline, world facts, internal consistency
• Brainstorm Partner - "What if" exploration, problem-solving

Includes genre-specific guides for:

• Spy thrillers (tradecraft, tension, moral complexity)
• Hard sci-fi (technical accuracy, worldbuilding, geopolitics)

Character Archetypes

Fiction-only companion to Fiction Workshop's character work. Two taxonomies plus four analysis modes for using archetypes diagnostically:

• Narrative-Role Archetypes - Vogler/Campbell's 8 character functions (Hero, Mentor, Threshold Guardian, Herald, Shapeshifter, Shadow, Trickster, Ally)
• Personality Archetypes - Jungian 12 (Mark & Pearson model): Innocent, Everyman, Hero, Caregiver, Explorer, Rebel, Lover, Creator, Jester, Sage, Magician, Ruler
• Analyzer - Diagnose or recommend an archetype pairing
• Audit - Flag stock/cliché use of an established archetype
• Conformance - Check for unexplained archetype drift across chapters
• Ensemble - Check cast-level archetype balance and gaps

Archetype is a starting scaffold, not a finished character — pair with Fiction Workshop's Want/Need/Wound/Lie framework to individualize.

Story Structure

Percentage-anchored macro plot structure, drawn from K.M. Weiland's landmark-beat model and James Scott Bell's signpost catalog:

• Landmark Beats - 11-beat skeleton (Hook, Inciting Event, First Plot Point, Pinch Points, Midpoint, Third Plot Point, Climax, Resolution) with percentages and diagnostics
• Signposts - Bell's 14 named checkpoints (Disturbance, Mirror Moment, Doorways of No Return, Q Factor, and more), overlaid on the landmarks or placed relatively between them
• Map - Place beats and signposts for a story not yet drafted
• Audit - Locate where beats actually land in an existing manuscript and flag missing, mistimed, or thin ones

Weiland's beats answer where a turning point falls; Bell's signposts answer what psychological work it needs to do.

Narrative Nonfiction

For self-help, prescriptive nonfiction, and structural-argument books with storytelling elements:

• Transformation Arc - Reader journey design
• Metaphor Consistency - Extended metaphor management
• Exercise Design - Practical application sections
• Reveal Engineering - Twist/reframe setup and payoff across four patterns:
  • Permission-reframe (training-wheels frame released as validation)
  • Empirical (counterintuitive data overturns received wisdom)
  • Structural (visible surface reframed by hidden mechanism)
  • Conceptual (new category installed; old framework dissolved)
• Voice Editing - Tone and persona consistency

Prose Mechanics

Sentence-level diagnostic audits for finished or near-finished drafts (fiction or nonfiction):

• Active/Passive Audit - Unjustified passive constructions, hidden agency
• Parallel Structure Audit - Broken grammatical parallels in lists, comparisons, series
• Sentence Length Variance - Flat-rhythm detection at the paragraph level
• Accessibility Audit - Readability scoring and structural accessibility (prose, not WCAG)

Run audits one at a time, in order. Each pass produces a flagged-issues report for author review.

Avoid AI Writing

Audits and rewrites text to remove AI-ism patterns that make prose sound machine-generated. Supports two modes:

• Detect mode — Flag AI-isms only; no rewriting. Use when auditing published content, someone else's writing, or when you want to decide yourself what to fix.
• Rewrite mode (default) — Flag AI-isms and rewrite the text to fix them.

Recommended workflow: run avoid-ai-writing after the line-edit pass in either fiction-workshop or narrative-nonfiction to catch any residual AI patterns before final polish.

Vendored from conorbronsdon/avoid-ai-writing (MIT). See ATTRIBUTION.md.

Installation

Direct from GitHub

/plugin install github:rhavekost/author-toolkit

For Team Projects

Add to .claude/settings.json:

{
  "enabledPlugins": [
    "github:rhavekost/author-toolkit"
  ]
}

Usage

Invoke skills directly:

/author-toolkit:fiction-workshop
/author-toolkit:character-archetypes
/author-toolkit:story-structure
/author-toolkit:narrative-nonfiction
/author-toolkit:prose-mechanics
/author-toolkit:avoid-ai-writing

Once activated, work with the editorial personas:

# Fiction
"As developmental editor, analyze Chapter 3"
"As line editor, polish this dialogue"
"Brainstorm mode—I need to solve [plot problem]"

# Character archetypes
"What archetype is this character?"
"Audit this scene for archetype cliché"
"Check archetype conformance for chapters 4-8"
"Run an ensemble balance check on the cast"

# Story structure
"Map the structure for this story"
"Audit this manuscript's structure"
"Check this manuscript for a Faux Climax"

# Nonfiction
"Help me design the transformation arc for my self-help book"
"Check metaphor consistency in chapters 4-8"
"Engineer the reveal for chapter 16"

# Prose mechanics
"Run active/passive audit on chapter 3"
"Run sentence-variance audit on chapter 7"
"Run accessibility audit on the whole manuscript"

# Avoid AI Writing
"Audit this chapter for AI-isms" (detect mode)
"Rewrite this chapter to remove AI patterns" (rewrite mode)

Quick Reference

Need	Invoke Skill	Then Say
Fiction writing/editing	/author-toolkit:fiction-workshop	"Let's build a story bible" or "As developmental editor, analyze Chapter 3"
Developmental pass	/author-toolkit:fiction-workshop	"As developmental editor, analyze [chapter]"
Line editing	/author-toolkit:fiction-workshop	"As line editor, polish [scene]"
Character work	/author-toolkit:fiction-workshop	"As character consultant, is this in character?"
Continuity check	/author-toolkit:fiction-workshop	"As continuity tracker, check for inconsistencies"
Get unstuck	/author-toolkit:fiction-workshop	"Brainstorm mode—I need to [solve problem]"
Archetype identification	/author-toolkit:character-archetypes	"What archetype is this character?"
Archetype cliché check	/author-toolkit:character-archetypes	"Audit [scene] for archetype cliché"
Archetype drift check	/author-toolkit:character-archetypes	"Check archetype conformance for chapters [X-Y]"
Cast balance check	/author-toolkit:character-archetypes	"Run an ensemble balance check on the cast"
Plan new story structure	/author-toolkit:story-structure	"Map the structure for this story"
Audit existing structure	/author-toolkit:story-structure	"Audit this manuscript's structure"
Nonfiction writing	/author-toolkit:narrative-nonfiction	"Let's build a blueprint for [book]"
Reader journey	/author-toolkit:narrative-nonfiction	"Design the transformation arc"
Metaphor consistency	/author-toolkit:narrative-nonfiction	"Check metaphor consistency in chapters 4-8"
Exercise design	/author-toolkit:narrative-nonfiction	"Design exercises for [concept]"
Active/passive pass	/author-toolkit:prose-mechanics	"Run active/passive audit on [chapter]"
Parallel structure	/author-toolkit:prose-mechanics	"Run parallel-structure audit on [chapter]"
Sentence variance	/author-toolkit:prose-mechanics	"Run sentence-variance audit on [chapter]"
Readability audit	/author-toolkit:prose-mechanics	"Run accessibility audit on [chapter]"
Audit chapter for AI-isms	/author-toolkit:avoid-ai-writing	"Detect mode — flag AI patterns in this chapter"
Clean AI-isms from chapter	/author-toolkit:avoid-ai-writing	"Rewrite mode — remove AI patterns from this chapter"

Attribution

This plugin vendors the avoid-ai-writing skill by Conor Bronsdon (@ConorBronsdon), sourced from conorbronsdon/avoid-ai-writing and licensed under the MIT License. The upstream LICENSE and README are preserved unmodified inside skills/avoid-ai-writing/. Full attribution and vendored commit SHA are recorded in ATTRIBUTION.md.

License

MIT. See LICENSE. Vendored third-party skills retain their original licenses inside their skill directories — see ATTRIBUTION.md for details.