writing-principles

writing-principles is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Natsummerance/readMD. It costs 41 tokens per session (1,080 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of writing-principles, MIT.

A guide to writing fiction that focuses on what readers enjoy and how AI-generated prose can weaken that experience. It covers trust, ambiguity, tension, clarity, and making each detail serve a purpose.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when drafting, reviewing, or diagnosing flat fiction passages. It can guide revisions to dialogue, description, emotion, pacing, and unresolved tension.
Why use it?
It helps identify prose that explains too much, removes useful uncertainty, or tells readers what to feel instead of letting them interpret the scene.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/natsummerance/readmd/writing-principles
Any agent
npx skills add Natsummerance/readMD --skill writing-principles
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Natsummerance/readMD

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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/natsummerance/readmd/writing-principles.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/natsummerance/readmd/writing-principles)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/natsummerance/readmd/writing-principles"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/natsummerance/readmd/writing-principles.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" 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 1,080 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 97% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00041 $0.01080
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.00540
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00216
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00108

Measured 4d ago against content hash 0e4527012ada, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, 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 4d 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

This is a copy

97% identical to writing-principles — 3 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

assets/upstream/haowjy-creative-writing-skills/fd7a3ad9cd7697a0645ff6ff4bd5e809cf7673a3/skills/writing-principles/SKILL.md · 107 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 107 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 · 107 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. 4d ago First seen · 107 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A 0e4527012ada

Subscribe to this mod's changes

writing-principles is a skill published in the GitHub repository Natsummerance/readMD (21 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 1,080 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 97% identical to writing-principles, differing in 3 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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