@rubytech/create-maxy-code 0.1.26 → 0.1.27

package/payload/platform/plugins/writer-craft/skills/point-of-view/references/indirect-narration.md

@@ -0,0 +1,72 @@
+# Indirect Narration and Polyphony
+
+## Beyond Direct Scene
+
+Not all storytelling is direct scene and action. Indirect narration encompasses all the ways a story communicates information, creates meaning, and builds its world without putting characters in a room together.
+
+### Story vs. Plot vs. Action
+- **Plot** is a device — a marvellous one — but not superior to story, and not necessary
+- **Action** must be present (something must change, something must move), but unceasing violent action is usually a sign that no story is being told
+- **Story** is broader than both — it is a narrative of events (external or psychological) that moves through time and involves change
+
+Some great stories have no conventional plot. The story is not in the plot but in the telling. It is the telling that moves.
+
+## Exposition: The Lump Problem
+
+### What Exposition Is
+Necessary information the reader needs to understand the story: world-building, backstory, technical details, historical context, character history. Every story requires some exposition.
+
+### The Expository Lump
+Information delivered as a block — a lecture from the author to the reader, pausing the story to explain. Science fiction writers are acutely aware of this problem because they must build entire worlds from scratch. But it appears in every genre.
+
+### Signs of an Expository Lump
+- The story stops while information is delivered
+- A character explains something they have no reason to explain to the person they're explaining it to ("As you know, Bob...")
+- A paragraph or passage exists purely to inform the reader, with no connection to the character's emotional experience
+- The narrative voice shifts from storytelling to lecturing
+
+### The Solution
+Break up the information. Grind it fine. Make it into bricks to build the story with.
+
+Techniques:
+- **Distribute across scenes** — deliver information only when the story needs it, not all at once
+- **Embed in action** — the character discovers the information as part of what they're doing
+- **Embed in dialogue** — characters discuss things they would naturally discuss, revealing information organically
+- **Embed in perception** — what the character notices and how they interpret it carries information about the world
+- **The TK method** — mark places where information is needed (TK = "to come") and return to integrate it later, when you know more about what the reader needs and when
+
+### The Goal
+Invisible exposition — information the reader absorbs without noticing they're being informed. The reader should feel they understand the world because they've been living in it, not because someone explained it.
+
+## Polyphony
+
+### Many-Voicedness
+The novel is inherently polyphonic — it contains many voices. Writers must be willing to let characters speak in their own voices, not as mouthpieces for the author.
+
+### What Polyphony Requires
+- Each character has their own vocabulary, rhythm, preoccupations, and blind spots
+- Dialogue should be distinguishable — the reader should often be able to identify who is speaking without attribution
+- Characters should be capable of surprising the author — if every character agrees with the author on every topic, the novel is a monologue wearing masks
+- Inhabit your characters — let them be themselves, even when they think and say things you disagree with
+
+### The Danger of Monophony
+When all characters sound alike — when the author's voice drowns out every character's individuality — the novel loses dimensionality. Every conversation becomes the author arguing with themselves.
+
+## Character by Indirection
+
+### Describing a Place to Reveal a Person
+A room, a desk, a garden — described when the character is absent — can reveal more about them than any direct characterisation. What they own, how they arrange their space, what's worn and what's pristine, what's hidden and what's displayed.
+
+### Describing an Aftermath to Reveal an Event
+The place where something happened, described after it happened, lets the reader reconstruct the event from evidence. This is more powerful than showing the event directly, because the reader's imagination fills in the gaps — and what the reader imagines is always more vivid than what you describe.
+
+### The Untold Event
+A glimpse of the mood and nature of an event by describing the place where it happened or is about to happen. The empty room after the party. The battlefield before dawn. The courtroom after the verdict.
+
+## Focus and Trajectory
+
+Every story needs:
+- **Focus** — what and who it is about, explicit or implicit
+- **Trajectory** — "the shape of a movement that never ceases, from which no passage departs entirely or for long, and to which all passages contribute in some way"
+
+The story knows its course. The writer's job is to be ready for it — to have the skills and self-discipline to follow where the story wants to go.

package/payload/platform/plugins/writer-craft/skills/point-of-view/references/pov-types-and-voice.md

@@ -0,0 +1,91 @@
+# POV Types and Voice — Detailed Guide
+
+## The Five Principal Points of View
+
+Each POV is demonstrated below using the same fictional scenario: Princess Sefrid enters a crowded room.
+
+### 1. First Person
+
+"I pushed through the crowd, scanning for Aleth. The heat was unbearable. Someone stepped on my foot — I barely noticed."
+
+**Rules:**
+- Only what "I" knows, feels, perceives, thinks, guesses, hopes, and remembers can be told
+- The reader infers other characters only from what "I" observes
+- Switching from first person to another POV within a piece is enormously difficult
+
+**Strengths:** Maximum intimacy; strong voice; the reader is inside one mind completely
+**Dangers:** Claustrophobia; every character risks sounding like the narrator; information delivery is limited to what the narrator can plausibly know
+
+**Masters to study:** Grace Paley — first-person narration that avoids every pitfall
+
+### 2. Limited Third Person
+
+"Sefrid pushed through the crowd, scanning for Aleth. The heat was unbearable. Someone stepped on her foot — she barely noticed."
+
+**Rules:**
+- Same essential limitation as first person — nothing is seen or known except what this character sees and knows
+- Switching from first to limited third is not just changing pronouns — the imaginative energy is different
+- You can shift between limited-third viewpoint characters, but with care and awareness
+
+**Strengths:** Intimacy without the constraints of "I"; can shift between characters; allows more flexibility in language
+**Dangers:** Accidental one-sentence POV slips into other characters' thoughts; the reader may not notice, but they feel the wobble
+
+### 3. Involved Author (Omniscient)
+
+"Sefrid pushed through the crowd. Aleth, had she known, was already watching from the gallery, nursing a drink and a grievance. Neither woman would leave the room unchanged."
+
+**Rules:**
+- No single viewpoint character — the author can enter any mind, see anything, judge and interpret
+- The author's voice is itself a presence in the narrative
+- Requires confidence — a timid omniscient voice feels intrusive; a confident one feels authoritative
+
+**Strengths:** Maximum flexibility; can provide context no character possesses; can move freely across time and space
+**Dangers:** Can feel distant; requires a strong authorial voice; handled clumsily, reads as head-hopping
+
+**Masters to study:** Tolstoy (War and Peace) — the gold standard
+
+### 4. Detached Author (Fly on the Wall)
+
+"A woman in a grey dress pushed through the crowd. She stopped twice, looked around, then continued toward the gallery. At the bar, another woman set down her glass."
+
+**Rules:**
+- Reports only what a neutral observer could infer from behaviour and speech
+- Never enters a character's mind
+- The least overtly but most covertly manipulative POV — everything is controlled by selection
+
+**Strengths:** Creates mystery; forces the reader to interpret; powerful understatement
+**Dangers:** Emotional coldness; readers may struggle to connect
+
+**Masters to study:** Raymond Carver
+
+### 5. Observer-Narrator
+
+"I watched Sefrid push through the crowd. She was looking for someone — Aleth, I assumed, though with Sefrid you could never be sure what she was really after."
+
+**Rules:**
+- The narrator is a character but not the protagonist
+- Available in both first and third person
+- Natural mystery about the protagonist's inner life — the observer can speculate but not know
+
+**Strengths:** Can observe the protagonist from outside while maintaining a personal voice
+**Dangers:** The observer can upstage the protagonist; limited access to the protagonist's thoughts
+
+**Masters to study:** Henry James, Willa Cather
+
+## Voice
+
+Voice is the sound of the narration — the personality, rhythm, diction, and sensibility that makes one narrator distinct from another. In practice, voice and POV are inseparable.
+
+### What Creates Voice
+- Word choice and diction level (formal, colloquial, technical, poetic)
+- Sentence structure and rhythm
+- What the narrator notices and ignores
+- What the narrator judges and how
+- The narrator's relationship to the reader (confiding, distant, unreliable, authoritative)
+
+### Reliable vs. Unreliable Narrators
+- In nonfiction: the author/narrator is expected to be honest about what they believe happened
+- In fiction: unreliable narrators reveal how people see the world and why — their distortions are the point
+- An unreliable narrator must be unreliable in ways the reader can eventually detect — otherwise there's no story, just confusion
+
+**Master to study:** Henry James, "The Turn of the Screw" — the paradigmatic unreliable narrator

package/payload/platform/plugins/writer-craft/skills/point-of-view/references/protagonist-filter.md

@@ -0,0 +1,71 @@
+# The Protagonist's Subjective Filter
+
+## The Brain Sees What It Believes
+
+We see the world not as it is, but as we believe it to be. The brain is a prediction machine — it constantly generates expectations based on past experience and then processes incoming data through those expectations. We don't perceive reality raw; we perceive reality through the filter of everything we've already experienced.
+
+For fiction, this means: the protagonist does not see the world neutrally. They see it through the specific lens of their history, their misbelief, their desire, and their fears.
+
+## How the Filter Works in Fiction
+
+### Everything Is Coloured
+When the protagonist enters a room, what they notice is determined by their filter:
+- A character who was betrayed by a friend notices exits and escape routes
+- A character who craves approval notices facial expressions and body language
+- A character who feels invisible notices who is being watched and who isn't
+- A character who fears abandonment notices who is standing close to whom
+
+The same room, described through different filters, is a completely different place.
+
+### Interpretation Is Not Neutral
+The protagonist doesn't just notice things — they interpret them. And their interpretation is shaped by their misbelief:
+- A neutral comment is heard as criticism (if the filter expects attack)
+- A kind gesture is suspected as manipulation (if the filter expects betrayal)
+- An innocent mistake is read as deliberate sabotage (if the filter expects hostility)
+
+These misinterpretations are not errors in the writing — they are the writing. They show the reader, through specific moments, exactly how the protagonist's worldview distorts their experience.
+
+### Memory Is Active, Not Passive
+When the brain retrieves memories, it does so in the service of understanding the present moment. The protagonist doesn't remember randomly — they remember because something in the present activated a past experience.
+
+For fiction: flashbacks and backstory must be triggered by present events. The character sees something now that connects to something then, and the memory surfaces because it's useful for interpreting the current situation. Flashbacks that arrive without this triggering mechanism feel arbitrary.
+
+## Emotional Point of View
+
+### Emotion Determines Meaning
+Without emotional signal, the brain cannot assign meaning, make decisions, or prioritise information. A brain that cannot feel is a brain that cannot think. For readers: if they do not feel what the protagonist feels, they are not processing the story.
+
+### The Protagonist Must React to Everything
+Every event must register emotionally in the protagonist. The reaction need not be dramatic — it can be subtle, internal, even suppressed — but it must be present. If a character witnesses something and has no emotional response, the reader's mirror neurons have nothing to latch onto. Meaning collapses.
+
+### Two Failures of Emotional POV
+
+**1. Describing events without the protagonist's emotional response:**
+"The building collapsed. Debris filled the street. People ran in every direction."
+— This is journalism, not fiction. Where is the protagonist? What do they feel?
+
+**2. Editorialising — telling the reader what to feel:**
+"It was a terrible sight. Anyone would have been horrified."
+— This is the author stepping in front of the character. Show the protagonist's specific, embodied response and let the reader's mirror neurons do the rest.
+
+### The Correct Approach
+Show the protagonist's physical, cognitive, and behavioural response:
+"The building folded inward with a sound like the world cracking. Sarah's knees buckled. She grabbed the railing and held on while the dust rolled over her, gritty and hot, tasting of concrete and something worse."
+
+The reader doesn't need to be told this is terrible. They are experiencing it through Sarah.
+
+## Body Language as Subtext
+
+The protagonist's physical response communicates what the character might never say directly. Humans instinctively read micro-expressions, posture, and gesture as signals of hidden truth.
+
+### In Fiction
+- Body language is not decoration — it is a "tell"
+- The physical reaction often reveals more than dialogue
+- A character who says "I'm fine" while gripping the armrest so hard their knuckles whiten is telling two stories simultaneously
+- The reader instinctively trusts the body over the words
+
+### Using Body Language Well
+- Specific and fresh — not clichéd (avoid "her heart raced," "his blood ran cold")
+- Consistent with the character — different people express the same emotion differently
+- Revealing something the character wouldn't say — body language is subtext, not illustration
+- Earning its place — every physical detail must carry meaning, not just atmosphere

package/payload/platform/plugins/writer-craft/skills/point-of-view/references/tense-and-person.md

@@ -0,0 +1,85 @@
+# Tense and Person of the Verb
+
+## Person of the Verb
+
+### First Person (I / We)
+The narrator is a character. Everything is filtered through their perception.
+
+Historical evolution: from Cicero's letters and medieval diaries through the epistolary novel (Richardson, Austen) to the modern first-person novel. First person is often assumed to be the simplest mode, but it introduces subtle traps — especially the tendency to make every character sound alike.
+
+### Third Person (He / She / They)
+The most common and least troublesome mode. Third person ranges from extremely intimate (limited third — practically first person with different pronouns) to extremely distant (detached narrator — practically a camera).
+
+**Limited third** is restricted to the perceptions, knowledge, feelings, and memories of one character. Technically very close to first person. Switching between limited-third viewpoint characters is possible but requires awareness.
+
+### Second Person (You)
+Rare in fiction. Creates an imperative, immersive quality. Can feel gimmicky if sustained too long. Works well in short bursts or in genres where it serves a specific purpose.
+
+## Tenses of the Verb
+
+### Past Tense
+The default narrative tense throughout most of literary history. Gives continuous access to before and after — minds move around easily as they normally do.
+
+**Metaphor:** Sunlight — illuminates everything, allows the eye to roam freely across time and space.
+
+**Advantages:**
+- Natural access to memory, reflection, foreshadowing
+- Allows the narrator to know more than the character knew at the time
+- The full range of verb forms is available
+- Does not create artificial urgency
+
+### Present Tense
+Dominant in contemporary fiction for the past thirty to forty years. Narrower in field of vision — necessarily focused on action in a single time and place.
+
+**Metaphor:** A narrow-beam flashlight — intense illumination of one spot, darkness everywhere else.
+
+**Advantages:**
+- Immediacy — the reader experiences events as they unfold
+- Creates inherent urgency ("a permanent artificial emergency")
+- Can be exactly right for fast-paced action or a character whose engine runs hot
+- Prevents the narrator from reflecting at length (which can be a feature or a bug)
+
+**Dangers:**
+- Many writers use it from fashion rather than conscious choice
+- If you always write in present tense, some verb forms may atrophy
+- Sustained present tense can feel relentless — no breathing room
+- Flashbacks and memory become technically awkward
+
+### Two-Timing
+Switching between past and present tense without awareness or signal is one of the most common and disorienting errors in contemporary prose. A passage that drifts from past to present and back within a paragraph without reason is simply broken.
+
+**The rule:** Every tense shift must be deliberate and must serve the story. If switching tenses, the shift should be clear enough that the reader understands they've moved in time.
+
+### Choosing Tense
+
+Questions to ask:
+- Does the story need access to before and after? → Past tense
+- Does the story need the claustrophobic intensity of the present moment? → Present tense
+- Is the narrator looking back on events with the knowledge of what happened? → Past tense
+- Is the narrator experiencing events without foreknowledge? → Either works, but present intensifies the effect
+- Are there multiple timelines that need to be distinguished? → Tense shifts can serve this, but must be deliberate
+
+## The Passive Voice
+
+### What It Actually Is
+The passive voice reverses the normal subject-verb-object order so that the object of the action becomes the grammatical subject.
+
+- **Active:** "The dog bit the man"
+- **Passive:** "The man was bitten by the dog"
+
+### The Fake Rule
+"Never use the passive voice" is not a real rule. The passive is a legitimate construction with specific uses.
+
+### When the Passive Is Appropriate
+- When the agent is unknown: "The window was broken during the night"
+- When the agent is less important than the action or result: "The cathedral was completed in 1247"
+- When the passive creates the right rhythm: sometimes the sentence simply sounds better
+- When the passive creates emphasis: "The city was destroyed" emphasises the city; "An earthquake destroyed the city" emphasises the earthquake
+
+### When to Guard Against It
+Passive voice that seeps in from academic, bureaucratic, or business English to obscure agency and responsibility:
+- "Mistakes were made" — by whom?
+- "It was determined that..." — by whom?
+- "The decision was reached to..." — by whom?
+
+This evasive passive is worth eliminating. The useful passive is worth keeping.

package/payload/platform/plugins/writer-craft/skills/prose-craft/SKILL.md

@@ -0,0 +1,100 @@
+---
+name: prose-craft
+description: "Reviews and teaches prose technique: sound and rhythm, sentence variety, punctuation, repetition, adjectives and adverbs, word economy, crowding and leaping. Use this skill whenever the user asks about prose style, sentence rhythm, sentence length, punctuation choices, grammar for writers, repetition in prose, adjective and adverb usage, word economy, crowding, leaping, prose polish, 'how does my writing sound', 'my prose feels flat/clunky/wordy', or any question about the craft of writing at the sentence and paragraph level. Also use when reviewing a passage for prose quality or when a writer wants to improve their style."
+---
+
+# Prose Craft
+
+The sound of language is where it all begins. A good writer has a mind's ear — they hear their prose as they write it. The common critical terms for weak prose (dull, choppy, droning, jerky, feeble) are all faults of sound. The chief duty of a narrative sentence is to lead to the next sentence, and it does this through pace, movement, and rhythm.
+
+This skill covers prose at the sentence and paragraph level: the physical material of writing.
+
+## Core Principles
+
+### 1. Sound and Rhythm
+Prose has musical properties. Not meter (that turns prose into poetry), but rhythm — the irregular, varying cadence created by sentence length, word choice, stress patterns, and silence. Train the mind's ear. Read prose aloud. If it sounds wrong, it is wrong, regardless of whether you can name the problem.
+
+The elements of sound:
+- **Onomatopoeia** — words that sound like what they mean
+- **Alliteration** — repetition of initial sounds
+- **Cadence** — the rise and fall of sentence rhythm
+- **Silence** — what is left out; the white space around the word
+
+### 2. Sentence Length and Variety
+There is no optimum sentence length. The optimum is **variety**. Rhythm in prose depends on the contrast between sentences of different lengths. A passage of all short sentences is choppy and monotonous. A passage of all long sentences is exhausting. The interplay is what creates music.
+
+Short sentences are highly effective in the right place. Complex sentences need clear construction so they carry the reader rather than losing them. A sentence so grand it stops the story is not working as a narrative sentence.
+
+Common problems:
+- **Conjunctivitis** — stringing short sentences together with "and" and "but", creating childish droning
+- **Misplacement** — sentence parts in the wrong order, creating ambiguity
+- **Danglers** — modifying phrases attached to the wrong noun
+
+### 3. Punctuation
+Punctuation tells the reader how to hear the writing. It makes grammatical structure clear and shows where the pauses and breaks come. Writers must be competent themselves — grammar-correcting software is dangerously incompetent.
+
+Know real rules from fake ones:
+- **Fake rule**: Never begin a sentence with "There is" (it's a legitimate existential construction)
+- **Fake rule**: Never use the passive voice (the passive is one of the lovely versatilities of the verb — guard against it only when it obscures agency)
+- **Real rule**: Know what you are doing with your language and why
+
+### 4. Repetition
+Deliberate repetition is one of the great powers of prose. Accidental repetition is clumsy. Learn to distinguish them.
+
+Repetition can be:
+- **Incantatory** — building rhythm and emotional weight
+- **Structural** — events echoing events across the novel
+- **Comic** — a recurring phrase gathering weight with each appearance
+- **Hammering** — a word repeated like a blow for emphasis
+
+The journalistic rule against using the same word twice on a page drives writers to the thesaurus for far-fetched synonyms that stick out like flamingos in a flock of pigeons. Reject it.
+
+### 5. Adjectives and Adverbs
+Rich, good, and nourishing — they cause obesity only when used lazily or overused. The key principle: when the quality can be put directly in the verb or noun, the prose will be stronger.
+
+- *They ran quickly* → *They raced*
+- *A growling voice* → *A growl*
+- *She said loudly* → *She shouted*
+
+Watch for:
+- **Qualifiers** (rather, a little, just, very, kind of, sort of) — bloodsuckers in prose
+- **Empty intensifiers** — "great", "suddenly", "somehow" — meaningless through overuse
+- **Hedging adverbs** — weakening statements the writer should commit to
+
+### 6. Crowding and Leaping
+**Crowding**: loading every rift with ore. Vivid, exact, concrete, accurate, dense, rich. Keep the story full of what's happening, moving, interconnected.
+
+**Leaping**: what you leave out. What you leave out is infinitely more than what you leave in. There must be white space around the word, silence around the voice. Listing is not describing. Only the relevant belongs.
+
+Crowd in the first draft. Then cut. Decide what counts, what tells, and cut and recombine until what's left is what counts.
+
+## Prose Review Checklist
+
+When reviewing a passage for prose quality:
+
+- [ ] Read it aloud (or with the mind's ear). Does it sound right?
+- [ ] Is there sentence length variety? Or monotonous uniformity?
+- [ ] Are long sentences clearly constructed and easy to follow?
+- [ ] Is punctuation doing its job — clarifying, not cluttering?
+- [ ] Is repetition deliberate and effective, or accidental and clumsy?
+- [ ] Can any adjective be absorbed into a stronger noun? Any adverb into a stronger verb?
+- [ ] Are there qualifier ticks (just, very, kind of, sort of, rather)?
+- [ ] Does every sensory detail serve the story — or is some of it travelogue?
+- [ ] Is the passage crowded enough (vivid, dense, moving)?
+- [ ] Has enough been leaped over (no listing, no unnecessary explanation)?
+- [ ] Does each sentence lead to the next?
+
+## When to Read Reference Files
+
+- **For sound, rhythm, and sentence variety** — read `references/sound-and-rhythm.md`
+- **For adjectives, adverbs, and word economy** — read `references/word-economy.md`
+- **For punctuation and grammar guidance** — read `references/punctuation-and-grammar.md`
+- **For the craft of deliberate repetition** — read `references/repetition.md`
+
+## Exercises to Offer Writers
+
+1. **Being Gorgeous** — Write a paragraph of narrative meant to be read aloud: use onomatopoeia, alliteration, repetition, rhythmic effects. Show off. Use the whole orchestra.
+2. **Am I Saramago** — Write 150-350 words of narrative with no punctuation and no paragraphing (a hectic group activity). Discover what punctuation does by forbidding it.
+3. **Short and Long** — Part 1: Write 100-150 words in sentences of seven words or fewer, each with subject and verb. Part 2: Write up to 350 words that is all one sentence.
+4. **Chastity** — Write 200-350 words of descriptive narrative with no adjectives or adverbs. Only verbs, nouns, pronouns, and articles. The most enlightening exercise there is.
+5. **A Terrible Thing to Do** — Take a piece over 400 words and cut it by half. Not trimming — counting words and reducing to half. Discover which words are Styrofoam and which are heavy gold.

package/payload/platform/plugins/writer-craft/skills/prose-craft/references/punctuation-and-grammar.md

@@ -0,0 +1,72 @@
+# Punctuation and Grammar for Writers — Steering the Craft
+
+## Why Punctuation Matters
+
+Punctuation tells the reader how to hear the writing. It makes grammatical structure clear and shows where the pauses and breaks come. An unpunctuated paragraph makes meaning hard to extract. The same words, punctuated differently, either clarify or destroy meaning.
+
+Writers must be competent in punctuation and grammar themselves. Copy editors are an endangered species, and grammar-correcting software is dangerously incompetent at understanding context and intent.
+
+## Grammar as the Writer's Toolkit
+
+Grammar is the vocabulary of the writer's tools. A writer who doesn't know grammar is like a carpenter who doesn't know a hammer from a screwdriver. You need to know the rules — not to follow them slavishly, but to break them consciously and effectively.
+
+### The Distinction: Correctness vs. Craft
+- **Correctness** is a social and political matter — it can be a marker of class and education
+- **Craft** is a matter of clear communication — in written prose, incorrect usage is disastrous because the reader has only the words, and they must be clear
+- Unconventional usage (fragments, run-ons, dialect, deliberate rule-breaking) is a legitimate craft choice — when it's conscious
+- Unconscious errors undermine the reader's trust
+
+## Fake Rules to Reject
+
+### "Never begin a sentence with 'There is'"
+There is no such thing as "the passive tense." "There is" is an existential construction that good writers use all the time. The claim that it's passive voice reveals ignorance of what passive voice actually is.
+
+### "Never use the passive voice"
+The passive is one of the lovely versatilities of the verb. It is perfectly appropriate in many situations:
+- When the agent is unknown: "The window was broken"
+- When the agent is less important than the action: "The building was completed in 1847"
+- When the passive creates the right rhythm or emphasis
+
+What writers should guard against: passive voice that seeps in from academic or business English to obscure agency and responsibility. "Mistakes were made" when someone specific made them.
+
+### "He is the generic pronoun"
+This is a social convention, not a grammatical law. Using "their" with singular antecedents is a conscious, defensible choice that many careful writers make deliberately.
+
+## Real Rules to Know
+
+### Sentence Coherence
+A sentence must hang together — it must be coherent. The parts must relate to each other clearly. When they don't, meaning becomes ambiguous or absurd.
+
+### Modifier Placement
+Place modifiers next to what they modify. Misplaced modifiers create unintended comedy:
+- "Walking down the street, the trees were beautiful" (the trees are walking)
+- "After rotting in the cellar for three weeks, my sister brought up some oranges" (the sister was rotting)
+
+### Dangling Participles
+A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must modify the subject of the sentence. If it doesn't, it dangles.
+
+### Comma Splices and Run-Ons
+- A **comma splice** joins two independent clauses with only a comma (often considered an error, but deliberately used by many skilled writers for rhythm)
+- A **run-on** jams two independent clauses together with no punctuation at all
+- The fix (when one is needed): period, semicolon, or conjunction
+
+### The Semicolon
+Joins two independent clauses that are closely related in meaning. Creates a pause longer than a comma but shorter than a period. A useful tool that many writers fear unnecessarily.
+
+## Key Punctuation for Prose Writers
+
+| Mark | Function in Prose |
+|------|------------------|
+| **Period** | Full stop. End of thought. Creates silence. |
+| **Comma** | Brief pause. Separates clauses, items, and modifying phrases. The most versatile and most misused mark. |
+| **Semicolon** | Connects related independent clauses. Creates a bridge between thoughts too close for a period, too independent for a comma. |
+| **Colon** | Announces what follows: a list, an explanation, or an amplification of what came before. |
+| **Dash (em dash)** | Interruption, parenthetical emphasis, or dramatic pause. More forceful than a comma, less formal than a colon. |
+| **Ellipsis** | Trailing off, omission, or the passage of time. Overused in amateur prose — use sparingly. |
+| **Parentheses** | Aside, digression, or supplementary information. Can create intimacy or distance depending on context. |
+
+## The Moral Dimension
+
+Socrates: "The misuse of language induces evil in the soul." This does not mean grammar errors are morally wrong. It means that language used carelessly — to obscure rather than clarify, to manipulate rather than communicate, to evade responsibility — is a failure of craft and, at its worst, a failure of character.
+
+The writer's obligation: know what you are doing with your language and why.

package/payload/platform/plugins/writer-craft/skills/prose-craft/references/repetition.md

@@ -0,0 +1,71 @@
+# The Craft of Repetition — Steering the Craft
+
+## Deliberate vs. Accidental Repetition
+
+There is such a thing as clumsy repetition — the accidental echo that occurs when you aren't rereading as you write. That kind is easy to fix in revision. But to make a rule against repetition is to go right against the nature of narrative prose.
+
+### The Anti-Repetition Myth
+The journalistic and pedagogical rule against using the same word twice on a page drives writers to the thesaurus in search of far-fetched synonyms — flaming words that stick out of their prose like flamingos in a flock of pigeons.
+
+If the right word is "said," use "said" — do not cycle through "exclaimed," "uttered," "pronounced," "declared," and "vouchsafed" to avoid repeating it.
+
+## The Power of Deliberate Repetition
+
+From the grandmother telling a folktale to the most sophisticated novelist, all narrators use repetition. The skilful use of it is a great part of the power of prose.
+
+### Types of Repetition
+
+**Verbal Repetition** — repeating a word or phrase for emphasis, rhythm, or accumulation:
+- A word repeated like a hammer blow, gaining force with each use
+- A phrase that becomes a refrain, changing meaning through context each time it appears
+- A key word echoed across paragraphs, creating subconscious connections
+
+**Structural Repetition** — events, situations, or patterns that echo each other:
+- Near-repetition of events in different contexts
+- A scene that mirrors an earlier scene but with changed stakes or meaning
+- Patterns across the novel analogous to recapitulation and development in music
+
+**Comic Repetition** — a recurring element that gathers comedic weight:
+- Micawber's "Something is certain to turn up" in David Copperfield, gaining meaning with each recurrence
+
+**Incantatory Repetition** — repetition used for ritual, rhythmic, or hypnotic effect:
+- Sacred and oral narrative is completely fearless about repetition
+- Repetition can give words majesty and power, as in an incantation
+- The repeated phrase shapes the story and marks its rhythm
+
+## How Repetition Works in Novels
+
+### Opening Chapters Set the Pattern
+The first chapters of great novels often introduce images, words, and themes that will recur throughout the book. Jane Eyre's opening chapters introduce images of imprisonment, fire, coldness, and justice that echo across hundreds of pages.
+
+### Repetition Creates Structure
+At the level of the whole novel, structural repetition creates the architecture the reader feels but may not consciously identify:
+- A conversation that recurs in different contexts, revealing how the characters have changed
+- An image (a colour, an object, a place) that appears at key turning points
+- A physical action repeated — the same gesture meaning something different each time
+
+### Repetition Reveals Change
+One of the most powerful uses: repeat an element and change one thing. The contrast between what's the same and what's different reveals exactly what has changed in the character or situation.
+
+## When Repetition Fails
+
+### Accidental Echoes
+An unconscious verbal echo within a paragraph or across adjacent paragraphs is distracting. It draws attention to the words themselves rather than what the words are saying. Catch these in revision by reading aloud.
+
+### Dead Repetition
+Repetition without accumulation — saying the same thing in different words without adding meaning. This is not the same as deliberate repetition for emphasis. Test: does each repetition add something? If the reader's response is "you already said that" rather than "yes, again, harder," the repetition is dead.
+
+### Thesaurus Syndrome
+The opposite failure: avoiding natural repetition by substituting awkward synonyms. If a character is walking, they are walking — they are not "ambulating," "perambulating," "proceeding on foot," and "locomoting." The word "said" can appear fifty times in a chapter and remain invisible; "ejaculated" cannot appear once without derailing the reader.
+
+## Practical Guidance
+
+### In First Drafts
+Don't worry about repetition. Write the word that comes naturally. Deliberate repetition will emerge instinctively if you're listening to the rhythm of your prose.
+
+### In Revision
+1. Read aloud and listen for accidental echoes — fix these
+2. Look for places where deliberate repetition could strengthen the prose — add these
+3. Check the thesaurus impulse — if you've replaced a natural word with a synonym to avoid repetition, put the original back
+4. Map structural repetitions across the whole text — are there patterns that could be strengthened?
+5. Check that every deliberate repetition accumulates meaning — each occurrence should add something the previous one didn't

package/payload/platform/plugins/writer-craft/skills/prose-craft/references/sound-and-rhythm.md

@@ -0,0 +1,64 @@
+# Sound, Rhythm, and Sentence Variety — Steering the Craft
+
+## Sound Is Primary
+
+The basic elements of language are physical — noise, sound, silence, rhythm. These matter in prose just as much as in poetry, though prose's sound effects are usually subtle and irregular. A good writer has a mind's ear. The common critical terms for weak prose — dull, choppy, droning, jerky, feeble — are all faults of sound.
+
+The chief duty of a narrative sentence is to lead to the next sentence. It does this through pace, movement, and rhythm.
+
+### Training the Mind's Ear
+- Read prose aloud, or read it silently with full auditory attention
+- Listen to what your own prose sounds like as you write it
+- When something sounds wrong, it is wrong — even if you can't name the problem
+- Language can express delight in itself, as music does — "poetry isn't the only kind of writing that can sound gorgeous"
+
+### Elements of Sound
+- **Onomatopoeia** — words that sound like what they mean (sizzle, hiss, slurp, crack)
+- **Alliteration** — repetition of initial sounds (not just identical letters — identical sounds)
+- **Cadence** — the rise and fall of sentence rhythm, created by the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables
+- **Silence** — what is left out; pauses created by punctuation, paragraph breaks, white space
+
+## Sentence Length and Variety
+
+### The Core Principle
+There is no optimum sentence length. The optimum is **variety**. Rhythm in prose depends fundamentally on the contrast and interplay between sentences of different lengths.
+
+### Short Sentences
+- Highly effective in the right place — for emphasis, impact, sudden revelation
+- Prose consisting entirely of short, syntactically simple sentences is monotonous, choppy, and irritating
+- The myth that short sentences are "more like speech" is wrong — people often use more complex sentences when speaking than when writing
+
+### Long Sentences
+- Need careful construction — clear connections, solid architecture — so they flow and carry the reader rather than losing them
+- A sentence so grand it stops the story is not working as a narrative sentence
+- The proper beauty and power of prose is in the work as a whole, not in individual show-off sentences
+- Long sentences can: build tension, accumulate emotional weight, enact a physical experience (a jolting journey, a flowing river, a gathering storm)
+
+### Common Sentence Problems
+
+**Conjunctivitis**: Stringing short sentences together with conjunctions ("and then... and then... and so... but then"), creating a childish, droning effect.
+
+**Misplacement**: Parts of the sentence in the wrong order, creating ambiguity or absurdity. ("Walking down the street, the trees were beautiful" — the trees are walking.)
+
+**Danglers**: Modifying phrases attached to the wrong noun. ("After rotting in the cellar for three weeks, my sister brought up some oranges.")
+
+## Rhythm and Emotional Register
+
+Rhythm should match and embody the emotional content:
+- Fast, staccato rhythm for action, urgency, shock
+- Slower, rolling rhythm for reflection, grief, beauty
+- Varied rhythm for conversation, ordinary life, complexity
+- A sudden short sentence after long ones creates emphasis through contrast
+- A long sentence after short ones creates a feeling of expansion or accumulation
+
+### Rhythmic Variety in Practice
+Map the sentence lengths in a passage. If they're all similar, the passage will sound monotonous regardless of content. The interplay of short and long, simple and complex, is what creates the music of prose.
+
+## Literary Examples of Sound
+
+- **Kipling** (Just So Stories): Exuberant vocabulary, musical rhythms, dramatic phrasing
+- **Twain** ("Jumping Frog"): Beauty through irresistible dialectical cadences
+- **Hurston** (Their Eyes Were Watching God): Rhythm with hypnotic, fatal, forward drive — simple vocabulary whose power is all in the beat
+- **Gloss** (The Hearts of Horses): Quiet, subtle — power from the perfect placement and timing of words
+- **Woolf** (To the Lighthouse): Variety of sentence length, complex syntax including parentheses, flowing and breaking until a one-word sentence stops everything: "Awake."
+- **Twain** (Huckleberry Finn): One long sentence made of short subsentences strung by semicolons, catching the rhythm of someone talking quietly — one of the great sunrises in literature