Building Woowoo from the Skills Up

31 March 2026#woowoo#fiction#dev#storytelling

A 42-day serialized narrative is a production problem before it's a creative one.

You have two characters writing independently across six weeks. Their voices can't bleed into each other. Their locations have to be consistent. The audience needs to be ahead of them by exactly the right amount — not so far ahead it's boring, not so close that the irony disappears. Puzzles have to be solvable from published information only. The whole thing has to hold together chronologically.

If you treat that as a creative problem, you write beautifully and ship nothing.

So I built a skill system.

what a skill is

Each skill is a SKILL.md file — a Claude Code skill definition that gives the agent a specific production role. There are eleven of them.

narrative-state is the foundation. Everything else reads from and writes to a shared set of JSON files: character locations, audience knowledge, puzzle status, the correspondence index, the dramatic irony log. Before any creative work, the agent reads state. After producing an artifact, it updates state.

The others layer on top:

voice-writer produces the actual artifacts — letters, postcards, SMS threads — in character voice
character-personas holds the character bibles that voice-writer draws from
mystery-architect drives the revelation pacing
puzzle-smith embeds the puzzles that mystery-architect designs
artifact-forge handles visual production specs and image prompts
ritual-scheduler manages the 42-day timeline

The dependency chain matters. voice-writer can't run without character-personas and puzzle-smith. artifact-forge can't run without visual-style-guide. The skills enforce a production order that prevents the kind of drift that kills serialized projects.

why state is everything

The hardest thing about a long-form narrative isn't the writing. It's consistency.

Margit is in Vienna on Day 12. She doesn't know Zoltan exists. The audience has seen three of his letters. The dramatic irony gap is at the right distance. If any of that slips — if Margit somehow knows something she shouldn't, if the locations stop making geographic sense, if the audience falls behind instead of staying ahead — the whole structure weakens.

The state files hold that consistency. Every artifact produced updates them. The agent checks state before writing anything. The characters don't know what they don't know because the state says so.

Treating the narrative like a codebase — with versioned state, explicit schemas, and a system that reads before it writes — is what makes a 42-day arc manageable.

what it produces

An artifact is whatever that day calls for. A letter with the right paper texture. A postcard with a stamped date and a deliberately ambiguous return address. An SMS thread that sounds like someone typing fast on a train.

The renderer in nutabu-tab knows what to do with each type. The production skill that created it follows a spec. The spec lives in the skill. The skill reads state first.

The whole chain runs from a prompt in an IDE.

Building fiction this way feels wrong until it feels obvious.

The story is still the story. The characters are still the characters. But the infrastructure that holds them is the same infrastructure that holds any complex system: state management, dependency order, explicit schemas, versioned snapshots.

The skills aren't the art. They're the production department that makes the art possible.

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