develop-characters

You can flesh out character arcs by answering targeted discovery questions about wounds, desires, fears, contradictions, and voice. The Skill reads your existing contextual files to tailor its questions and writes the resulting profiles directly into a characters.md file.

Structuring character arcs in markdown involves documenting emotional wounds, desires, and contradictions in a characters.md file. This Skill automates that process by asking priority questions and appending unresolved plot elements to an open_questions.md file for iterative tracking.

Yes, character development relies on reading existing contextual files like story_concept.md, world_rules.md, and CLAUDE.md. Providing these files beforehand allows the discovery conversation to tailor its questions accurately to your novel's specific world rules and narrative context.

Yes, you can use the guided discovery conversation to revise existing characters in your novel. The Skill reads your current characters.md file alongside contextual documents, asks targeted questions to deepen their arcs, and writes the updated profiles back into the file.

During character development, the Skill captures unresolved story ideas by writing them into an open_questions.md file. This ensures that new narrative questions generated during the discovery conversation are documented for later plot resolution and iterative character refinement.

A limitation of conversational character discovery is that it conducts a single-round session focused only on specific emotional traits like wounds, fears, and voice. It requires pre-existing contextual markdown files to function properly and cannot generate character profiles independently without your guided input.