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, and the world answers with one immediate consequence — not a chain. |
| Say | Yours | Your line reaches the page as your protagonist's quoted dialogue, with the wording polished to fit their voice. The scene then answers once — a reply, a silence, a reaction — and stops before the next exchange. |
| Story | The world's | The event you name is what happens; the prose is polished around it and stops before the world produces a second development. Leave the box empty and the model picks the development itself. |
| Describe | Nobody's | A sensory, atmospheric passage on the focus you named, with no plot movement, then control comes back to you. |
Ctrl/⌘ + 1–4 selects a type directly. The beat that comes back is chipped Action, Dialogue, Narration or Description to match.
Story is the only type that accepts an empty directive. Sent empty mid-scene it moves the world one step — a character acts on a goal of their own, the environment shifts, time edges forward, someone arrives, a silence breaks — and then hands control back. Sent empty as the very first beat, it opens the novel instead: it establishes the immediate situation from your premise and puts your protagonist somewhere they can act.
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.
The model is given no word or paragraph target. The beat scales to the weight of what you asked for and no further, which has a direct consequence for how you work: 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 beat's worth. A directive that packs three developments into one sentence still comes back as a single beat; the model renders what you named and stops before the next thing happens. 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 Describe when you want the camera, not the plot. It is the only type guaranteed not to move the story.
- 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
Novels are steered differently depending on how far in you are. For the first three beats the model is told to establish the moment in concrete sensory detail rather than front-load exposition. Up to about fifteen it is told to build on what already happened — a callback, a shift, a complication. Past that it is told to keep each character specifically themselves and to hold each beat to its directed unit rather than drifting into what comes next.
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