Style Sheet — TITLE

The binding constitution of the prose. Every chapter — whoever drafts it — conforms. When in doubt, consult this file, not taste; the drafter may have no taste in context.

Read this first, drafter. The sections below are ordered by how often they are violated, not by how interesting they are. §2 and §3 are the ones that matter. A style sheet that describes a mood produces prose at the centre of the distribution — four previous novels written to four detailed mood-descriptions came out statistically indistinguishable. This one describes sentences and prohibitions instead. See desk/method/07-voice-engineering.md.

1 · What the book is

One paragraph. The premise, the argument, and what it refuses to resolve. If a scene seems to require breaking something here, the scene is wrong.

2 · The voice, at the level of the sentence

Not adjectives. Answer these, concretely:

Sentence shape. Long and subordinated, or short and coordinated? Does a clause qualify what came before it, or sit beside it? Where does the weight of a sentence fall — front or end?
Causation. Does this narrator explain why, or place two facts next to each other and leave the reader to join them? (Default answer for this author: it explains, constantly, with because. Decide deliberately whether that is wanted here.)
Paragraph shape. How does a paragraph end — on a turn, an image, a flat statement, a qualification?
What gets noticed first when this narrator enters a room.
Register of comparison. Which domain do the figures come from? (See §4.)
Dialogue. Attribution style; how much subtext; what people do instead of answering.

3 · Prohibitions

The constraints that work. A prohibition leaves the solution unspecified, so it has to be invented; a target names the solution, so it can be complied with — and compliance, for this author, means retrieval of the nearest thing in the distribution.

Inherited bans. Every construction in desk/method/06-idiolect-ledger.md, at the budgets in this book’s editorial/voice-profile.toml. Bans name constructions with free slots, never strings: banning “I want to be precise about” produced “exact / honest / clear / modest / careful” and 32 surviving instances.
This book’s additional bans. Whatever the previous book was measured to overuse.
The forbidden image bank (§4).
Do not add an “AI-slop blacklist.” Every book since Believer carried one, and it is ceremony. Measured across all four manuscripts, its banned items occur 0–2 times in 355,000 words (“little did they know”: 0; “it was then that”: 0; “a testament to”: 0), while the constructions this author actually writes run at 399 occurrences for the the way you simile alone. The blacklist encodes a human’s imagination of how an LLM writes badly instead of a measurement of how this one does. Delete it; the measured ledger replaces it.

4 · The image banks

Owned: the metaphorical domains this book draws from.
Forbidden: a domain this book may not enter, chosen because the obvious conceits live there. This is the single most productive constraint available — it makes the central figures unusable and forces them to be rebuilt rather than retrieved.
The canonical figures table: experience → the figure the book uses for it. Every figure has one owner, one home chapter, and a budget. Warning: this table, as previously used, manufactured the defect the critique panel later flagged. Handing every parallel drafter one shared metaphor system, to a model that primes itself on whatever is in context, guarantees the xerox — Sentience’s “reach for the seam like a tongue for a pulled tooth” appeared near-verbatim in six narrators. Keep the table only with owners and budgets attached, and never model a figure in a drafting prompt that the drafter is not the owner of.

5 · Per-narrator fingerprints

For each narrator: syntactic habit · metaphor domain · figures owned exclusively · figures forbidden (because another narrator owns them) · characteristic evasion (what they reach for instead of the true thing) · what they will never say · behaviour under stress.

Characters must diverge under stress, not converge. Draft crisis scenes homogenise because attention goes to the plot, but linguistic defence is individual — so the highest-emotion scenes are where difference should be most visible. Specify it here and the hardest passages become a lookup.

6 · Point of view and psychic distance

Whose head, in what tense, and — the part usually left out — the distance range permitted, and where in a scene it may change. Gardner’s rule is not “stay close”; it is that unexplained shifts read as amateur. Purple prose, talking heads, white-room, and info-dump are one defect wearing four names: unmotivated camera placement.

7 · Exposition

Dramatize, don’t lecture. An idea enters when a character needs it to act, decide, or suffer. One idea set-piece per chapter, maximum. Real material must be correct where used; invent at the level of proper nouns, never at the level of physics.

Under-claim. Where the book leans on a real result, say what that result actually says. Never borrow a theorem’s prestige for an invented consequence; never state a live question as settled. Where something is genuinely unknowable from the inside, say that it is unknowable rather than inventing a texture for it — the admission is both more honest and more moving than the counterfeit. When the choice is between felt and impressive, choose felt.

8 · Refrains

Every deliberate repetition, with its owner, its home chapter, its budget, and — the part that makes it a refrain rather than a tic — what changes on each recurrence. A refrain that recurs unchanged is a tic wearing a refrain’s clothes. Anything recurring in three or more chapters and not listed here will be reported by prose_audit.py as self-priming.

9 · Rationing

One aphorism per chapter, maximum.
Chapter word range.
Chapter endings must not converge on one move. Blind readers detect the template by the fourth chapter of a run.

10 · Mechanics

Spelling; em dash style; numbers; italics; section-break glyph; chapter header format; epigraph rules; how in-world terms are glossed (once, invisibly, through action — never with a definition).

11 · Quoting and the law

No copyrighted contemporary text. Public-domain sources may be quoted briefly and attributed. Prefer in-world documents for epigraphs. Paraphrase ideas and credit in the back matter.

12 · What this book refuses

The ambiguities left open on purpose, so that a later revision pass does not helpfully resolve them. An undeclared refusal is indistinguishable from a forgotten promise.