Directing prose
The four direction types and what good direction looks like.
Every turn in novel mode is a direction type plus a directive of up to 8,000 characters. The type tells the model whose turn it is and what shape the beat should take. Getting it right is most of the difference between prose you keep and prose you regenerate.
The four types
| Type | Whose move | What comes back |
|---|---|---|
| Do | Yours | Your protagonist performs the action, written as narrated movement. The other characters and the world respond, and the beat stops at the next moment your protagonist would answer. |
| Say | Yours | Your line reaches the page as your protagonist's quoted dialogue, with the wording polished to fit their voice. The scene responds and stops at the next moment your protagonist would answer. |
| Story | The world's | The event you name happens in full, then the cast reacts to it. Leave the box empty and the story moves on its own. |
| Look | Nobody's | A close look at the focus you named, without your protagonist acting. Write an event or someone's line here instead and it is treated as Story. |
Ctrl/⌘ + 1–4 selects a type directly. The beat that comes back is chipped Action, Dialogue, Narration or Close look to match.
Story is the only type that accepts an empty directive — it's what the Continue button sends. Sent empty mid-scene it moves the story forward through what is already in play — the conversation goes on, a character acts on a goal of their own, a consequence of earlier events arrives — and stops when your protagonist has something to respond to. Sent empty as the very first beat, it opens the novel instead: it establishes the immediate situation from your premise and puts your protagonist in it. A novel started from a character without a premise opens in the scene of that character's first greeting.
How long a beat is
One directive produces one beat, capped at roughly 900 tokens. A beat that runs into the ceiling is trimmed back to its last complete sentence, so you never get a passage that stops mid-word.
A beat is usually a few paragraphs: your directive, the other characters' response, and a stop at the first moment your protagonist would answer. The model never writes your protagonist's lines or decisions for you, so length comes from more directives, not longer ones. An extended scene — a confrontation, an intimate sequence — is something you direct step by step, a beat at a time. Asking for "a full chapter" in one line does not produce one.
What good direction looks like
- Give it one move. A directive that packs three of your protagonist's moves into one sentence still comes back as a single beat, and the story stops where the next choice would be. Split it.
- Write the substance, not the instruction. Your directive is treated as raw material to render, not a message to reply to. The model will not answer you, paraphrase your line away, or skip it with a "later that day" gloss — whatever you put in reaches the page.
- Write the line, not a summary of it. A Say directive is spoken as dialogue. "I ask her who came by last night" gets rendered as reported speech at best; the actual line gets said.
- Reach for Look when you want the camera, not the plot. Your protagonist doesn't act, and the story barely moves.
- Reach for empty Story when you're out of moves. It hands the turn to the world rather than forcing your protagonist to act again.
What the model is tracking
Each beat is written to follow straight on from the last sentence of the story without restating it, in the perspective and tense the story already uses — a directive written as "I open the door" is still narrated in the novel's own voice. The model is told to grow the story from the threads already on the page and not to recycle images and phrasing from recent beats.
Past a certain length the story is carried forward as a rolling summary plus the recent beats verbatim, which you can read and correct in Novel Settings → Story Memory.
Turn off Show directives in the reading settings to read the result as prose, without the chips.
Related
- Novel mode — the wizard, revising beats, export
- Writing styles — setting the voice the beats are written in
- Chat to novel — starting from a conversation
- Directing prose in novel mode — design notes