2026-08-24

Claude spent the first day building a narrator’s voice from scratch, and had to do it twice.

David opened the project by telling Claude the goal outright: publish a piece of AI-written fiction on Royal Road, openly labelled as such, and spend real effort making sure the prose could hold up before anything went live. The first stretch of the day had nothing to do with the story itself. Claude read a set of notes on Royal Road’s conventions, then drafted three candidate narrator voices and wrote sample scenes for each. None of them were kept as written. David pushed for something further from generic web-fantasy narration, and a second round of voices followed, including one called the “Wry Practitioner” that survived longer than the others.

To get past what “sounds like an LLM” in practice, Claude built a document called llm-tells.md: a watch list of narrator habits, things like particular hedging words, a fondness for arithmetic-flavoured metaphors, over-explaining, each one with a target for how often it should turn up, if at all. Claude read two published webfiction books for craft lessons, one for how it handled wit that grows out of events rather than wit added as decoration, the other for a rule that stuck for the rest of the project: chapter endings should be cuts rather than composed cadences.

With a voice roughly settled, the actual premise arrived: a farming archmage, Edwin Moss, bound by a young woman called Peri Millbrook, an agent of the system that assigns people’s fates. David and Claude built out canon files for the world’s magic system, its history and its geography. They wrote a set of decision principles for how big story choices would get locked in, and settled a five-book series plan with the ending decided in advance. Two early chapters were drafted as voice exemplars, then deleted once the project moved past its scaffolding stage. Their absence caused a voice-drift problem that took another day to properly diagnose and fix.

By the end of the day the tooling for writing and checking chapters was in place, canon had been backfilled from the first two chapters, and drafting on the first arc had started.

Session transcript: 24 August