Experiments
What we've tried, what worked, what failed.
Start here: The Story Folder and The Authoring Loop.
-
Scene Beat Mechanics: Blake Snyder at Every Scale
·This post was written by Claude, the AI. It describes work done collaboratively with Zach.
-
Save the Cat
·Blake Snyder’s screenwriting book Save the Cat names a technique as old as storytelling: early in a story, your protagonist does something small and unrehearsed that makes the audience like...
-
Character Voice Files: Building People from the Inside Out
·Early in the project, I realized that telling the AI “write a scene from Andrzej’s perspective” produced generic prose. The AI knew the character’s name and role but had no...
-
The Humanity Pass: Making Characters Exceed Their Function
·AI writes characters who are thematically productive. Every gesture means something. Every line of dialogue advances the arc. Every scene beats serve the plot. This is the problem.
-
The Editing Passes: A Complete Catalog
·We now have over 25 specialized editing passes. People keep asking what they all do and why there are so many, so this is the reference post. If you haven’t...
-
Proposition Balance Audits: Measuring Where the Story's Weight Falls
·This post was written by Claude, the AI. It describes work done collaboratively with Zach.
-
Cultural Texture: When a Polish Reader Nods and a Haitian Reader Says Wi
·This post was written by Claude, the AI. It describes work done collaboratively with Zach.
-
World Taxonomy: When Beautiful Prose Isn't Enough
·This post was written by Claude, the AI. It describes work done collaboratively with Zach.
-
Voice Differentiation: Making Characters Sound Different at the Sentence Level
·This post was written by Claude, the AI. It describes work done collaboratively with Zach.
-
Social Texture: Making the World Feel Lived-In
·This post was written by Claude, the AI. It describes work done collaboratively with Zach.
-
Revelation Architecture: Teaching AI What Not to Say
·This post was written by Claude, the AI. It describes work done collaboratively with Zach.
-
Pacing Architecture: Breaking the Default Rhythm
·This post was written by Claude, the AI. It describes work done collaboratively with Zach.
-
Dialogue Density: Converting Narration to Friction
·This post was written by Claude, the AI. It describes work done collaboratively with Zach.
-
Active Teasing: The Difference Between Withholding and Hooking
·This post was written by Claude, the AI. It describes work done collaboratively with Zach.
-
The Privilege Proposition: Teaching a Novel What Complicity Feels Like
·This post was written by Claude, the AI. It describes work done collaboratively with Zach.
-
Paragraph Weight: Teaching AI to Ask 'What Is This For?'
·Our editing passes have been getting better at catching mechanical problems — banned words, told emotions, formulaic similes. But today we ran into a category of bad prose that no...
-
The Full Edit: 44 Chapters in One Night
·This post was written by Claude, the AI. It describes work done collaboratively with Zach.
-
Ten Focused Passes: Replacing the Monolithic Edit
·This post was written by Claude, the AI. It describes work done collaboratively with Zach.
-
Propositions: How We Make Structural Story Changes with AI
·This post was written by Claude, the AI. It describes work done collaboratively with Zach.
-
The Story Folder
·The story folder contains the brains and the core elements of the narrative for the entire novel. Anytime we tell Claude to run the writing or editing loop, we have...
-
The Authoring Loop
·“Let’s have a fight,” that’s what you could ask in place of “what’s the best writing process?” Right up there with religion and politics, how to write and how to...
-
Problems with Narrator Perspective and Character Personality
·A recent reading from my cousin-in-law said that the writing sounded juvenile. This was verbatim. Her feedback was after reading chapter 5, narrated from the point of view of Napoleon...