authorial-voice

authorial-voice is a skill for Claude Code from third-order-labs/longform-plugin. It costs 40 tokens per session (2,340 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for capturing and maintaining the distinctive viewpoint and sound of a novel's narrator and characters.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps define the narrator's worldview, decide what the prose notices or ignores, and keep the author's and characters' voices consistent throughout a long-form work.
Why use it?
A manuscript can follow the same surface writing rules yet still feel inconsistent if its underlying perspective changes from chapter to chapter.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the longform plugin — 6 skills, 4 commands shipped together

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/third-order-labs/longform-plugin/authorial-voice
Any agent
npx skills add third-order-labs/longform-plugin --skill authorial-voice
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/third-order-labs/longform-plugin

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install longform, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills, 4 commands.

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 authorial-voice

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/third-order-labs/longform-plugin/authorial-voice.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/third-order-labs/longform-plugin/authorial-voice)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/third-order-labs/longform-plugin/authorial-voice"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/third-order-labs/longform-plugin/authorial-voice.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 40 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,340 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00040 $0.02340
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.01170
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00468
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00234

Measured 5d ago against content hash f42e89767ad1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

authorial-voice 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 5d 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.

skills/authorial-voice/SKILL.md · 151 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 151 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Authorial Voice

Voice in long-form fiction is the deeper problem beneath coherence. Continuity tracking ensures chapter 40 doesn't contradict chapter 2. Voice ensures the novel reads like it was written by one consciousness with a consistent worldview across 300 pages. This skill covers capturing that consciousness and maintaining it at scale.


Voice vs. Style

Style guide = surface. Prose register, sentence length, POV rules, dialogue formatting. You can follow a style guide and produce competent generic prose. Two different writers can follow the same style guide and produce completely different novels.

Authorial voice = the perceptual filter underneath. What the narrator pays attention to, what they skip, what they believe about the world. You can't follow a checklist for this — it has to be consistent across 300 pages because it comes from a consistent consciousness.

The style guide says HOW to write. The voice doc says WHO is writing.

Hemingway didn't write short declarative sentences because of a style guide. He wrote that way because of who he was — his worldview produced the style. The authorial consciousness layer captures the who, not just the how.


The Authorial Consciousness Layer

What the voice doc captures — not a style spec, but a portrait of the mind behind the prose:

Attention filter

What does this narrator notice? Physical spaces? Social dynamics? Interior states? The mundane? Power structures? The body?

A narrator who lingers on landscape writes differently from one who lingers on power dynamics — and this colors every scene, not just the ones "about" that thing. The attention filter determines which details make it onto the page and which get passed over. It's the most pervasive element of voice because it operates in every paragraph.

Beliefs about the world

Not the theme of the novel — the narrator's operating assumptions. Do people change? Are institutions redeemable? Is violence ever justified? Is love sufficient? Does effort correlate with outcome? Is the universe indifferent or responsive?

Read the full file on GitHub · 151 lines

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. 5d ago First seen · 151 lines · 40 tokens per session scan A f42e89767ad1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

authorial-voice is a skill published in the GitHub repository third-order-labs/longform-plugin (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 40 tokens to every session and 2,340 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 2026-08-31.

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