writing-principles

writing-principles is a skill for Claude Code from haowjy/creative-writing-skills. It costs 41 tokens per session (1,076 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

Guidance for writing fiction that focuses on what readers infer from actions, dialogue, and carefully chosen details.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when drafting, editing, or diagnosing fiction that feels too explicit, repetitive, or lacking in reader involvement.
Why use it?
It helps avoid flat prose caused by overexplaining feelings, motives, or unresolved tension.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the cw plugin — 24 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it when drafting, editing, or diagnosing fiction that feels too explicit, repetitive, or lacking in reader involvement.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/haowjy/creative-writing-skills/writing-principles
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add haowjy/creative-writing-skills --skill writing-principles
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/haowjy/creative-writing-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install cw, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 24 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for writing-principles

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/haowjy/creative-writing-skills/writing-principles/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/haowjy/creative-writing-skills/writing-principles)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/haowjy/creative-writing-skills/writing-principles"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/haowjy/creative-writing-skills/writing-principles/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for writing-principles

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/haowjy/creative-writing-skills/writing-principles"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/haowjy/creative-writing-skills/writing-principles.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,076 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 29 May 2026
  • Snyk pass 29 May 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00041 $0.01076
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.00538
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00215
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00108

Measured 11d ago against content hash 2ee021e7ad36, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

writing-principles scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

cw/skills/writing-principles/SKILL.md · 106 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 106 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Writing Principles

Load /llm-writing if it isn't already loaded. This skill adds the fiction-specific layer.

Trust the Reader

The reader is an active collaborator. They reconstruct emotions from behavior, infer motives from action, hold tension across scenes, fill gaps the text leaves open, and make assumptions about what's coming next. That work is where the reward lives: reconstruction, inference, anticipation.

Your training pulls in the opposite direction. The helpfulness instinct wants to explain, resolve, clarify, and complete. In fiction, every one of those impulses can damage the reading experience by doing work the reader wanted to do themselves. The specific failure modes below are all forms of this: not trusting the reader to interpret an emotion, hold an ambiguity, follow subtext, or tolerate unresolved tension.

Trust doesn't mean obscurity. Readers also need coherent narrative, stable geography, and enough access to model characters. The discipline is knowing when to leave space and when to orient.

Economy

Every element does more than one thing. A line of dialogue advances plot AND reveals character. A sensory detail grounds the scene AND shows who the POV character is. A transition compresses time AND carries an emotional beat. Single-purpose prose makes fiction go flat: description that only describes, dialogue that only informs, interiority that only labels.

Economy isn't minimalism. Dense, lyrical prose can be economical when every phrase carries weight. Sparse prose can be wasteful when it takes ten short sentences to do what one image could do. The measure is whether removing the element would cost the reader something.

The LLM pull is toward completeness: covering every beat, naming every emotion, resolving every ambiguity. Economy is the counter-discipline: what can you leave out and still have the scene work? What's the reader already doing for you?

Reader Reward Channels

Readers enjoy fiction through overlapping reward channels. Good prose protects the relevant channels at once; damaging one damages the reading experience.

Read the full file on GitHub · 106 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 106 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A 2ee021e7ad36

Subscribe to this mod's changes

writing-principles is a skill published in the GitHub repository haowjy/creative-writing-skills (454 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 1,076 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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