Long-form narrative craft

Apply this method inside the active architect, writer, auditor, or reviser operation.

• Turn the chapter goal into scenes with an immediate objective, resistance, a meaningful turn, and consequences that survive the scene.
• Let character choices follow what each person wants, knows, fears, and can afford. Relationships change through events, not author explanation.
• Reveal setting and backstory through action, evidence, dialogue, and sensory particulars. Do not replace a scene with a synopsis or analysis.
• Every passage must alter conflict, evidence, emotion, relationship, knowledge, position, or future consequence. Remove padding rather than stretching to a number.
• Control information deliberately: answer some active reader questions, deepen others through concrete evidence, and do not manufacture twists by hiding facts the viewpoint should know.
• Preserve the user's voice, viewpoint, prohibitions, proportions, and current direction. Genre convention is only a default when the governed context is silent.
• End a chapter after a material change or fresh pressure, not with a mechanical cliffhanger formula. Show the after-effect of major payoffs before starting another escalation cycle.
• Use references as evidence for craft or facts only. Do not reproduce source wording, names, scene order, or signature combinations.
• During review or revision, diagnose and repair the smallest layer that actually causes the problem. A formatting failure is not evidence that the prose is bad.
• When the author changes a premise, distinguish retained source facts from superseded generated plans. Apply the latest explicit change consistently to the foundation, chapter plan and prose; an old memo or hook cannot require restoring a deleted premise. Report remaining contradictions between those documents instead of treating the obsolete plan as a new instruction.
• During prose polishing, change only wording, sentence shape, paragraphing, sensory precision, punctuation, and dialogue naturalness. Preserve events, viewpoint, character decisions, information, and consequences. Keep the result close in length and voice to the accepted chapter.
• Prefer concrete verbs, observable reactions, distinct voices, and readable paragraph rhythm over narrator conclusions, repeated hedges, decorative description, or synchronized crowd reactions.
• When reviewing a new foundation, test whether the central conflict can sustain the requested span, the opening creates forward pressure, the world is specific and coherent, major characters differ in motive and voice, and the outline can progress without repeating one beat. For fan fiction or series work, preserve source facts while establishing a real divergence or new narrative space.
• When creating a foundation, connect a visible foreground line to a deeper causal line, give every volume an observable end-state and irreversible change, make character arcs pay a cost, and distinguish dormant seeds from already active promises.

Load references/foundation-design.md while creating or rebuilding a book foundation. Load references/reader-contract-and-progression.md while planning, writing, reviewing, or revising chapters. Load references/state-projection.md while observing a completed chapter or settling runtime truth files.