Genre Craft

Overview

Genre-specific structural packs: the codified craft each genre expects, as checkable rules, ledgers, and audits. Packs cover mystery (fair play + clue ledger), romance (beats + HEA contract), thriller (ticking clock, power imbalance, set pieces), horror (dread/terror ordering, monster rules), MG/YA (category constraints), science fiction (load-bearing speculative elements), fantasy (quest structure, magic paid off by its rules and costs), historical fiction (period voice, anachronisms, real people), comedy (escalation, comic set-ups and payoffs, tone), and serial/episodic structure. Use at story-init (pick the pack, set the constraints) and in revision (run the pack's audit).

Prerequisites

A story project must already exist (created via the story-init skill) with its genre recorded in story.md. A plot structure (plot-structure) should exist or be in progress.

When to Use

• Starting or re-categorizing a story in one of the covered genres
• Planning genre load-bearing elements (clues, clocks, season goals)
• Auditing a draft against its genre's contract
• NOT for line-level genre voice (that belongs to the better-writing skill's genre work); these packs are structural
• NOT for literary fiction as a pack — its conventions resist deterministic encoding by design

Workflow

1. Pick the pack. Read story.md for genre/sub-genre and load the matching reference:
   • Mystery / crime / detective → references/mystery-fair-play.md
   • Romance → references/romance-beats.md
   • Thriller / action / suspense → references/thriller.md
   • Horror → references/horror.md
   • Middle grade / young adult → references/mg-ya.md
   • Science fiction → references/scifi-pipeline.md
   • Fantasy (epic, quest, secondary-world) → references/fantasy.md
   • Historical fiction → references/historical.md
   • Comedy (romantic comedy, farce, satire, cosy comedy) → references/comedy.md; a cosy mystery not played for laughs needs only the mystery pack
   • Serial / episodic / web serial → references/serial-episodic.md
   • Multi-genre stories: load each applicable pack; where packs conflict (e.g. horror's slow dread vs. thriller's cliffhangers), decide with the user which genre's contract dominates per section and record the decision in story.md notes.
2. Set the constraints up front. Apply the pack's structural requirements during planning:
   • Mystery: create continuity/clues/ and ledger every clue and red herring via story add clue '...' --planted chapter-NN --payoff chapter-NN, with significance-delayed frontmatter where the reader sees the clue before understanding it and red-herring: true on misleading clues (story add clue '...' --red-herring; their payoff is the chapter that debunks them). Run story clues . for the fair-play matrix and story diagram clues for the plant-to-reveal flow.
   • Thriller: log every promised deadline in continuity/promises/ and give every scene a date and time, so story timeline . shows the story clock.
   • Serial: record season-goal: in story.md and episode-question: in each installment's frontmatter, and the release cadence as release-every: (days, or months such as 1 month) and release-start: (YYYY-MM-DD) in story.md, or release-date: on a chapter. story next . shows the next episode due and warns when one due within release-warn-days: (default 3) has no prose.
   • MG/YA: record target-words: in story.md and check the category constraints (protagonist age, minimized adult involvement).
   • Sci-fi: write the speculative element's rules, costs, and limits in worldbuilding/systems/ before the climax exploits them.
   • Fantasy: write the magic's rules, costs, and limits in worldbuilding/systems/ (the worldbuilding skill designs them) and log the quest goal and any prophecy in continuity/promises/.
   • Historical: record setting-era in story.md, the chosen period register in the style sheet, and a research/ note (the research skill) for every fact the plot leans on and every real person; run the editorial-review real-people pass for anyone living or recently dead.
   • Comedy: record the comic sub-genre in story.md, the tone line (where comedy stops) in its ## Tone & Style section, each comic lead's flaw in their character file, and each running gag or call-back the reader is owed a payoff on as one promise in continuity/promises/. Sentence-level comic timing belongs to the line-editing skill.
3. Draft against the pack. Use the pack's beat concepts and rules alongside the chapter-writing workflow and the scene-craft scene-grain tools. Cross-link thriller pacing to the Fichtean curve note in references/thriller.md, and check thriller and serial chapter endings with story pacing . (chapter hook values, and runs of resolution endings); cross-link serial book-level canon to the series-continuity skill.
4. Run the pack audit in revision. Each reference ends with an audit checklist. Run it as part of a developmental revision pass (see the revision-continuity skill) and record findings in the revision plan.
5. Record genre decisions. Any deliberate deviation from the pack (a romance without a black moment, a mystery that withholds) is a story decision: note it in story.md with the reason, so later audits don't "fix" it.

Conventions

• Pack-specific entities use the project conventions: kebab-case ids, YAML frontmatter, _index.md registries where a collection exists (continuity/clues/ follows the continuity/promises/ pattern).
• Clue planted must precede payoff (story continuity flags payoff-before- plant as an error); deadline promises follow the same ordering logic as promise/question ordering.
• Clues carry the links: each clue names its planted and payoff chapters and, under characters, the suspects it implicates or clears, and story links checks those ids. Character files have no clue field; to list a suspect's clues, run story list clues --where characters={character-id}.
• Genre audits live in the revision plan or continuity/ audit files — never only in chat.

CLI Maintenance

Use the Story CLI when it is available. If story is not installed, use the bundled fallback node ../story-maintenance/scripts/story.js with the same arguments. Use node <checkout>/bin/story.js instead only when the user names a Story Skills repository checkout or you are working in one. Write the script as an absolute path (resolve the fallback relative to this skill folder) and run it from the folder you would run story from, so . and other relative paths keep their meaning. Use Node, not Bun or a package script: Bun would load that folder's bunfig.toml (which can run code) and .env, and a package script runs from the checkout's root. If no CLI is available, perform the registry, backlink, and word-count checks manually.

After adding or changing genre entities (clues, deadlines, comic set-ups, season goals, episode questions):

story reindex .
story wordcount . --write
story check .
story clues .     # mystery: fair-play matrix and warnings

Reference Files

• references/mystery-fair-play.md - Fair-play doctrine, clue-planting techniques, red-herring discipline (red-herring: true), gather-suspects reveal, clue ledger convention, the story clues fair-play matrix and story diagram clues
• references/romance-beats.md - Widely-published romance beat concepts (paraphrased), HEA/HFN reader contract, the black moment
• references/thriller.md - Ticking clock honored once promised, power imbalance, set pieces, mini-cliffhanger endings, Fichtean curve pairing
• references/horror.md - Dread vs. terror vs. gross-out ordering, the uncanny, monster rules stated early, recovery periods
• references/mg-ya.md - Word-count norms, age-appropriate voice/stakes, minimized adult involvement, content boundaries
• references/scifi-pipeline.md - Speculative element must be load-bearing, rules stated before exploited, worldbuilding→plot pipeline
• references/fantasy.md - Quest and journey structure, magic rules stated before the climax relies on them, cost and limits, secondary-world exposition, chosen-one pitfalls
• references/historical.md - Period voice vs. readability, anachronism checks (things, words, ideas), invented vs. real people, ethics of the real past, the author's note
• references/comedy.md - Escalation, reversals, comic set-ups and payoffs (call-backs, rule of three, running gags), character-driven humour (comic flaw, straight man and funny man, want vs. need), tone management and comic sub-genres; sentence-level timing handed to line-editing
• references/serial-episodic.md - Season/volume goal, per-episode dramatic question, a reward in every installment, recap discipline

Shared Conventions

Every story skill follows the shared conventions in ../story-maintenance/references/conventions.md, resolved relative to this skill folder. Read it before creating, renaming, or linking story files. If that file is missing because this skill was installed without story-maintenance, the essentials are: kebab-case ids and filenames, YAML frontmatter on every story-project file, _index.md registry tables that story reindex rebuilds (never edit them by hand), bidirectional links between entities, characters for who is on the page and mentions for who is only referred to, status: deceased plus died-in: chapter-{NN} for deaths, and no project-local generator or build scripts (run only the installed or bundled Story CLI).