From nickcrew-claude-ctx-plugin
Crafts narratives for fiction, brand stories, character development using Hero's Journey, three-act structure, show-don't-tell techniques.
npx claudepluginhub nickcrew/claude-cortexThis skill uses the workspace's default tool permissions.
This skill crafts compelling narratives using proven story structures—from the Hero's Journey and three-act structure to the single-scene vignette and brand origin format. It covers character development, scene-setting, dialogue, pacing, and the specific techniques that create emotional resonance: show don't tell, sensory detail, tension and release. Whether you're writing a short story opening...
Transforms lessons and insights into compelling short stories with tension, conflict, and takeaways using story arc templates. Useful for business storytelling, narrative social posts, and engaging dry content.
Crafts compelling narratives using story frameworks. Auto-activates on requests like 'help me with storytelling' or 'create a narrative'.
Drafts narrative fiction prose for scenes, chapters, and dialogue. Supports interactive collaboration with authors or autonomous generation from briefs, applying craft fundamentals like scene entry, purpose, and POV.
Share bugs, ideas, or general feedback.
This skill crafts compelling narratives using proven story structures—from the Hero's Journey and three-act structure to the single-scene vignette and brand origin format. It covers character development, scene-setting, dialogue, pacing, and the specific techniques that create emotional resonance: show don't tell, sensory detail, tension and release. Whether you're writing a short story opening, a founder's origin narrative for a pitch deck, or a bedtime story, this skill produces writing that keeps readers turning pages.
technical-writer or blog-post skills)copywriter skill)academic-essay skill)| Task | Approach |
|---|---|
| Three-act structure | Setup → Confrontation → Resolution |
| Hero's Journey | Ordinary world → Call → Trials → Transformation → Return |
| In medias res | Open in the middle of action, fill context in later |
| Show don't tell | "She clenched her jaw" not "She was angry" |
| Scene-setting | 2–3 precise sensory details, not a catalog of the room |
| Dialogue | Each character has a distinct voice; dialogue reveals character and moves plot |
| Pacing | Short sentences = fast/tense; long sentences = slow/reflective |
| Conflict types | Person vs. person, person vs. self, person vs. nature, person vs. society |
Define the story's core emotional question. Every great story asks a question that keeps readers engaged: Will she escape? Can he forgive himself? Will they make it in time? Identify this before writing.
Choose a story structure.
Three-Act Structure (universal, flexible):
Hero's Journey (character transformation stories):
In Medias Res (short fiction, openings):
Kishōtenketsu (Japanese 4-act structure, no conflict required):
Brand Origin Structure (for companies and founders):
Build the character. For any protagonist, establish:
Write scenes, not summaries. Scenes happen in real time, in a specific place, with characters doing and saying things. Summaries skip time. Use scenes for what matters; use summary for transitions.
Apply "show don't tell." Tell: "He was nervous." Show: "He refreshed the email three times in a minute." Convert internal states to external, observable behavior.
Use sensory detail selectively. Don't describe everything—choose 2–3 specific, surprising details that do double work: establish setting AND reveal character or theme. "The apartment smelled like cigarettes and fresh paint" tells you more than a paragraph of description.
Write dialogue that earns its place. Every line of dialogue should do at least two things: reveal character, move plot, establish conflict, or provide information. Cut dialogue that only conveys information. Give each character a distinct speech pattern.
Control pacing deliberately.
For brand/founder stories: Stay specific and personal. Vague mission statements are forgettable. The moment the founder spilled coffee on her laptop and realized every portable stand was designed for left-handers is unforgettable.
Input: "Write the opening scene of a short story about a lighthouse keeper who discovers the light has gone out on the night of the worst storm in decades. Tone: tense, literary. Third-person limited POV."
Output:
The bulb had never died before. Not once in nineteen years.
Maren stood in the lamp room with a dead flashlight in one hand and the emergency manual in the other, listening to the storm disassemble the world outside. Forty-foot swells, the radio had said at six. That was two hours ago. By now the swells were whatever they were and the ships were wherever they were and the light—the one thing between them—was dark.
She found the replacement bulb by feel, wedged behind the maintenance log in a bracket she'd installed herself the winter after her father died. Her hands knew where it was before her mind did. That was what nineteen years felt like: the body remembering what the mind forgot to.
The replacement slotted in with a click that felt too small for how much was riding on it.
She pressed the switch.
Nothing.
She counted to three, the way her father had taught her. Don't panic until you've waited. The mind invents failures the hands can fix.
She pressed it again.
The light bloomed into the dark and swept the wall in one slow revolution, and somewhere below, through two panes of glass and forty feet of screaming wind, she thought she heard the ocean give something back.
Craft notes:
Input: "Write a founder origin story for a company called Rootwork that makes tools for genealogy researchers. Founder: Diane, a Black American woman who started researching her family history after her grandmother died and hit walls with traditional genealogy tools designed around European surname conventions. Keep it under 300 words."
Output:
How Rootwork Started
After her grandmother Lottie died, Diane wanted to know who came before her.
Not just names and dates. Names and dates she could get. She wanted to know what Lottie's mother's hands looked like when they worked, where exactly in Georgia her great-great-grandmother had been born, and whether anyone had written down what she liked to cook.
She tried the big genealogy platforms. She learned quickly that these tools had been built for a particular kind of family history—the kind traced through last names that stayed stable across generations. Her family's history didn't work that way. Enslaved ancestors were listed by first name only, if at all. Counties had changed. Records had burned. The search fields assumed a paper trail that slavery had deliberately destroyed.
The tools weren't wrong, exactly. They just weren't built for her.
So she started building something that was.
Rootwork is designed around the research patterns that oral histories, freedmen's bureau records, DNA matches, and community documentation actually require. It treats the absence of a document not as a dead end but as a data point. It connects researchers to archives that most platforms don't index, and to a community of genealogists doing the same painstaking, necessary work.
Lottie lived to ninety-one and never knew her grandmother's full name. Diane thinks about that every day.
Rootwork is for everyone who hits a wall in their family history—and especially for those whose walls were built by design.
Craft notes: