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

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.

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?

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

The channels compose: optimizing one at the expense of others fails. Over-explaining breaks social simulation. Under-explaining breaks transportation. Generic style breaks aesthetic pleasure. Impenetrable style breaks flow.

Readers increasingly associate em dashes with AI-generated prose. Default to punctuation that leaves less visible AI residue: sentence breaks, commas, colons, semicolons, parentheses, or dialogue beats. Rewrite the sentence around the actual relationship between clauses instead of substituting a hyphen. Use dashes only when a project style file or author instruction makes them part of the voice. When a line needs interruption, prefer the project's documented interruption pattern and keep it consistent.

This skill is the diagnostic layer: it names what readers want and how training damages it. When a passage feels off and you can't name why, check the reward channels — which one broke? — then see for common patterns and fix heuristics.

The craft skills carry the execution. has the how-to-write guidance: prose immersion (), scene mechanics (), and style analysis (). has the production modes for putting prose on the page.