Guiding the story

Ask for another take whenever an answer disappoints you, as many times as you like. The pager above the turn counts them, 2 / 3, and every take is kept. You choose which one the story carries by leaving it selected, and you can come back and select a different one later.

A turn you do not like costs you a click. Nothing is overwritten and nothing is lost.

A second take on the same message usually lands near the first, because it is answering the same message. When you want the story to move somewhere else, edit your turn and generate again.

• One extra clause is often the whole fix: she stays by the door, or a "quietly" in front of what you say.
• Write what your character does. "I search the desk" gives the narrator something to answer; "make this more tense" gives it an instruction with no scene in it.
• Name things the way the story names them. A person, a place or an object mentioned by name pulls its character sheet or its lore entry into the turn.
• Keep one intention per turn. Three unrelated actions in one message get a sentence each at best.

/gm steps outside the story, and nothing you write after it becomes part of the prose. Use it two ways:

• Ask. What has been established, who somebody is, what happened the night before last. The answer comes out of the story's own record rather than invented, so this is how you check what is true before you write a turn that depends on it.
• Say. Ask for less of something, correct a fact the narrator has wrong, or say where you want the next few turns to go.

A turn can be edited, and sometimes one sentence is the whole repair. What you leave is what the story carries from then on, so this is also how you keep a take you liked apart from the one line in it you did not.

Rewind to here cuts the story back to the turn you choose, so you can take it somewhere else from that point. Reach for it when the problem started several turns ago and the last turn is only where you noticed it.

When you find yourself asking for the same correction every few turns, put it somewhere it will be sent on its own:

Style directives

How the prose should read: tense, person, register, turn length, and the habits you want it to drop. On the scenario.

Turn reminder

One short line, re-sent near the end of the context, for the rule that keeps slipping. On the scenario.

The ledger

Edit the fact the narrator keeps getting wrong. A fact you have edited is marked as yours, so the extractor leaves it alone. In the story.

See writing a scenario for how to word the first two, and playing a story for what else the bookkeeping model keeps.