story-skills

Quick start  ·  Continuity engine  ·  Skills  ·  CLI  ·  Examples  ·  Docs  ·  Contributing

Story Skills gives agents a shared project format for fiction: the story bible, characters, worldbuilding, plot arcs, scenes, continuity state, promises and payoffs, and chapter drafts. Everything is plain markdown with YAML frontmatter, packaged as Agent Skills and as Codex and Claude Code plugins.

The companion story CLI treats the story bible as a checkable contract. Its continuity engine finds dead characters who reappear, payoffs that land before their setup, and stale story state, before a reader does. Read why it works this way.

Quick start

Writing in claude.ai without a terminal? Writers: start here shows how to upload a skill as a zip. To skip setup entirely, Plothold is a paid, hosted app built on Story Skills.

Claude Code. Type these inside a Claude Code session, not a shell:

/plugin marketplace add danjdewhurst/story-skills
/plugin install story-skills@story-skills

Codex

codex plugin marketplace add danjdewhurst/story-skills
codex plugin add story-skills@story-skills

Any other agent that supports SKILL.md can use the Agent Skills CLI:

npx skills add danjdewhurst/story-skills   # or: bunx skills add danjdewhurst/story-skills

Then ask your agent to "Start a new story".

• Install the skills covers the other agents, including GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, Gemini CLI, and OpenCode.
• Let your agent install it has a prompt that installs the skills for you.
• New to Story Skills? Getting started walks through a first session. The documentation index links every guide, and the documentation website has the same pages with search.

The continuity engine

Language models are weak at long-range consistency, and prompting does not fix that. Story Skills makes it deterministic. Character deaths, promises and payoffs, open questions, scene casts, and object and knowledge state live in frontmatter. story continuity reports contradictions the way a compiler reports type errors.

examples/the-unraveled-thread/ is a deliberately broken mystery. Every file is well formed, so it passes story validate and story links, but the story does not hold together:

$ story continuity examples/the-unraveled-thread
Continuity check failed: 4 errors, 3 warnings, 0 dismissed
error: chapters/chapter-04.md lists edran-vale, who died in chapter-02; move posthumous appearances to mentions
error: continuity/promises/the-broken-compass.md pays off in chapter-02 before it is planted in chapter-03
error: continuity/questions/who-burned-the-mill.md resolves in chapter-02 before it is introduced in chapter-03
error: continuity/state.md knowledge-state[0] references missing chapter chapter-05
warning: chapters/chapter-03.md POV character nessa-thorn is not listed in characters [pov-not-in-cast]
warning: continuity/promises/the-sealed-letter.md was planted in chapter-01, 3 chapters ago, and has no payoff yet [promise-unpaid]
warning: continuity/state.md object-state[0] status active conflicts with worldbuilding/artifacts/vales-compass.md status destroyed [state-status-conflict]

Each finding names its file and reproduces exactly, and CI asserts this output on every commit. Intentional flashbacks and posthumous appearances stay legal through the chapter mentions field. Findings listed in continuity/exemptions.md are reported as dismissed. story doctor and story next turn the same checks into repair actions.

Prefer an app?

Plothold is a web app for writing fiction, built on Story Skills, for writers who would rather not use a terminal or a coding agent. You chat with a writing partner on one side, and the book updates on the other: chapters, cast, world, open threads, and a story check powered by the same continuity engine. It runs in the browser on a laptop or a phone, imports drafts from Word, and exports EPUB, PDF, and Word.

Plothold is a paid product made by the Story Skills maintainer, and its subscriptions fund Story Skills development. It has a free trial. Your book is stored on Plothold's servers; its privacy policy says how it is handled. Story Skills itself stays free and MIT-licensed, and Plothold is a separate product built on top of it.

Skills

Most books move through the skills roughly in this order. research, scene-craft, voice-style, verse-craft, and editorial-review are used whenever they are needed rather than at one fixed point. story-maintenance runs underneath all of them, and series-continuity starts the next book. The Skills catalogue has the full details and how the skills hand work to each other.

The table lists the skills in the same order, with what each one does and a request that starts it.

Skill	Try saying
premise-workshopTests a spark as a premise, then hands off to story init	"Is there a novel in this idea?"
story-initScaffolds the story bible, folders, and registries	"Start a new story"
character-managementBuilds character profiles, relationships, and arcs	"Create a character"
worldbuildingBuilds locations, systems, factions, and invented terms	"Design a magic system"
plot-structurePlans arcs with three-act, hero's journey, Save the Cat, and other structures	"Create a plot arc"
theme-craftFinds the controlling idea, the moral argument, and the motifs	"What's my story really about?"
genre-craftChecks genre conventions, such as mystery fair play, romance beats, and horror	"Plan a fair-play mystery"