Jimmy Yao's Creative Writing Skills

 I spent some time the other day looking for writing skills on Github. The one I found first was Creative Writing Skills, which is actually far more.

First off, I had Claude read through it. Claude created a folder named "untitled-story", which you can download here if you are interested.

You can use it with Claude Cowork(which is what I will do here and what Jimmy recommends). But if you prefer a different agent, just point it at the folder and turn it loose.

One (optional) addition I made today was adding a folder full of Jason Hamilton's genre guides - in this example, the alpha male romance. You can also add some of your own work into the draft folder but in this case, I was starting at the very beginning.

Since I didn't have a story ready, I had Claude generate 10 Log Lines. I chose this one and added it to the folder.

<

  Snowbound Sovereign — Fleeing a corrupt sheriff, a small-town waitress crashes
  her car outside a mountain compound owned by a reclusive billionaire with
  cameras on every tree and grief he's never spoken aloud.

The key to this system is the Muse skill. You can manually activate it if you need to. I also have the superpowers skills installed, which are great at planning.

Anyway, that kicked off a whole series of questions that worked out the plot outline. Finally it had to work on. Which led to another set of questions. Eventually resulting in:

Snowbound Sovereign — Chapter Map (draft 1)
Everything below is proposal — treat the whole document as AI-tagged
except where it restates canon. Target: ~80–85k words, 30 chapters plus
epilogue, averaging 2,500–2,900 words. Chapters carry day markers; the day
count is the book's clock. Hypothesis, not contract — if drafting breaks it,
we change it.

Canon anchors: Cassie Monroe fled Miller's Bend after half-witnessing Sheriff
Dale Hutchins have Deputy Danny Pruitt killed (she hasn't connected the dots).
Ethan Vale hasn't left the compound in two years. Iron gate. At least six days
before Hutchins locates her. Warrant arrival → siege → cameras win. Closed
door. HEA.
---
ACT I — The Gate (Ch. 1–6, Days 1–2)
Ch. 1 — Night One. Storm, mountain road, the crash. What she's running
from arrives only as fragments: a shift that ended wrong, something in the
dark behind the diner, a bag packed in twenty minutes. The iron gate — she'd
never press that intercom in any other life. She presses it. Silence, long
enough to hurt. Pull: the gate opens.
Ch. 2 — Day 1. Inside. Ethan: courteous, remote, exact. First aid,
dry clothes left outside a door, rules stated once. She clocks the cameras —
on every tree, in most rooms' corners. A guest suite that feels never used.
Change: shelter secured. Pull: she realizes the house is watching her.
Ch. 3 — Day 1, night. She can't sleep; explores as far as unlocked doors
allow. One wing is closed. Finds the monitor room glow under a door — he's
awake at 3 a.m., watching the gate feed. Not her feed — the gate. Pull:
why the gate?
Ch. 4 — Day 2. Morning negotiation: phone lines are down (storm — true),
her car is dead in the ravine by the gate. He offers the landline when it's
back; she deflects — first visible crack in "stranded motorist." He notices.
He notices everything. Change: mutual suspicion established as the
relationship's starting terms.
Ch. 5 — Day 2. Dot Levesque arrives (last run before the storm closes
the road). Warmth, gossip, appraisal. Through Dot the reader gets Miller's
Bend texture and the first exterior view of Ethan: "Two years, and you're
the first person he's let past that gate." Dot leaves; road closes behind
her. Change: isolation now total. Pull: two years since WHAT?
Ch. 6 — Day 2, night. First real conversation — two people who both
answer questions with questions. Almost-honesty over dinner. Then the intercom
buzzes: someone at the gate in the dark. It's no one — a plow driver turning
around — but his reaction is wildly out of scale: white-knuckled, gone from
the room. Act I ends on his disproportion. Pull: the gate means something.
ACT II-A — Wary Orbit (Ch. 7–15, Days 3–5)
Ch. 7 — Day 3. Her flashback sharpens (first full shard): Danny Pruitt's
face in the diner that last morning — a regular, coffee the same way for
years, and lately something eating him she could see but not name. She wants
to tell someone what's happened — the want is physical — but runs the list
and can't finish it: everyone she'd call answers, one way or another, to Cade
County. Then the regional alert: her face. MISSING PERSON, filed by the Cade
County Sheriff's Office. Filed by Hutchins. Change: the one certainty is
that trust is the trap. She can't call anyone.
Ch. 8 — Day 3. She tests him: shows him the alert herself, gambling that
the man who watches everything has already seen it. He has. "You're not
missing," he says. "You're hiding. Do it better." He tows her car inside the
gate with the compound tractor — first joint project, first alliance.
Change: complicity chosen over questions.
Ch. 9 — Day 3–4. Vale Systems texture: she watches him work — remote
board calls, cameras he designed, a company run from exile. Julian Osei
enters by video call; warm, worried, watchful. Julian clocks Cassie in the
background — says nothing. Plant: Julian sees more than he's shown.
Ch. 10 — Day 4. Cabin fever and proximity. A near-moment — interrupted
by her second memory shard: the sound she heard behind the diner. Two voices.
One was Hutchins. She pulls back from Ethan; he reads it as rejection.
Change: attraction named (to herself); trust still withheld.
Ch. 11 — Day 4. She finds the edge of his grief: the closed wing, and in
a drawer she shouldn't have opened, a woman's things boxed with terrible
neatness. He finds her there. Cold fury — the worst fight of the book.
Pull: she's certain now there was a woman, and that the woman is dead.
Ch. 12 — Day 4, night. Separate rooms, both sleepless. She almost takes
the plowed-once road on foot — actually packs. Stops at the gate. Realizes:
out there is Hutchins; in here is a man whose anger was grief wearing armor.
She goes back in. He watched the whole thing on the monitors — and opens the
front door before she reaches it. Change: both choose this, visibly.
Ch. 13 — Day 5. MIDPOINT I. The long night, her half: she says it out
loud for the first time — assembles the shards for him, and in speaking,
connects the dots. Danny Pruitt is dead. Hutchins killed him or had it done.
And the second realization lands on top of the first: what she knows can
bring the sheriff down. She's not just a loose end — she's the case Danny
died trying to deliver. Change: the problem changes category twice — from
danger to weapon. Fear starts becoming purpose.
Ch. 14 — Day 5. MIDPOINT II. The long night, his half: he tells her about
the girlfriend and the gate — the careless ending, her drive up the mountain,
the locked gate, the silence, her death. Two years inside the walls since.
Told plainly, without self-pity; the prose stays with Cassie receiving it.
Change: the cameras finally make sense. The book's two wounds are now on the
table between them.
Ch. 15 — Day 5. Morning after truth. Gentleness without romance yet —
they are careful with each other in a new way. Strategy begins: what she saw,
what would prove it, who exists outside Cade County's reach. He starts making
moves — the first time in two years he acts on the outside world. Pull: his
outreach is traceable.
ACT II-B — Closed Circuit (Ch. 16–22, Days 5–7)
Ch. 16 — Day 5–6. Working the problem as partners: Danny Pruitt's last
weeks reconstructed from what she knows; Ethan's quiet money turning over
rocks (a records pull, a lawyer on standby). The rocks turn something up:
Danny had been preparing to go to the State Attorney General about
Hutchins's corruption — that's why he died. The destination of the case is
now obvious: they finish Danny's errand. Competence is intimacy. Change: a
real case exists, and it has an address.
Ethan–Hutchins history threads in here or Ch. 20: they've known each
other a long time. Ethan grew up in this town before college and Silicon
Valley; Hutchins would've been happiest if he'd never come back — he doesn't
like anyone in "his county" he can't control. Ethan's read on Hutchins is
therefore old knowledge: he remembers what Hutchins was before the badge.
That personal history should sharpen every intercom exchange in Act III —
first names, old grudges under procedural language.

Ch. 17 — Day 6. Julian, on video, gets read in — partially. Offers help;
mentions, too casually, that he "keeps an eye on the old system." Neither
Cassie nor the reader can weigh what that means yet. Plant: the backdoor,
in plain sight.
Ch. 18 — Day 6. The turn to love — snowbound set piece (power flickers,
generator, firelight; the compound at its least fortress-like). First kiss,
and the door closes on the rest. Fade. Change: alliance becomes love.
Both are now something the other can lose.
Ch. 19 — Day 7. Morning-after lightness — the book breathes. Then the
cost lands: one of yesterday's outreach threads pulled a wire somewhere.
A too-specific question comes back down the mountain (the records request
pinged a Cade County terminal; a clerk owed Hutchins a favor). Neither of
them knows yet. Dramatic weight carried by wrongness: a plow passes twice.
The same truck idles at the trailhead camera. Pull: something is off.
Ch. 20 — Day 7. Hutchins works it from his end (rendered without his
POV — she and Ethan reconstruct it from camera feeds and the county scanner):
the wellness-check probe. A deputy at the gate, polite, wrong. Ethan handles
it through the intercom — lies smoothly, sends him off. They watch the
cruiser sit at the bottom of the road for nineteen minutes before leaving.
Change: found — probably. Pull: how much does Hutchins know?
Ch. 21 — Day 7, night. War council. Leave (his jet, his money, disappear —
he's offering to abandon the compound, which she understands is him offering
everything) vs. stand (turn what she knows into a case that lands before
Hutchins can move). She refuses to run — running is what got Danny killed
around her; running is all she's done. He aligns. Change: her defining
choice made — she stands. Mirrors his still to come.
Ch. 22 — Day 8. Preparation montage grounded in dread: statement recorded
and encrypted to the lawyer; Julian looped in fully — and the backdoor
detonates between the friends. Canon: Ethan didn't know. Julian confesses
it because it's suddenly useful; Ethan is furious — two years of grief
watched through a peephole he never consented to — and has no time for the
fury, because the backdoor is also the plan. The man whose cameras point
outward learns he's been on somebody's screen all along. Cassie watches him
choose to be grateful later. Dot calls: "There's talk in town. Hutchins
knows." Headlights at the bottom of the mountain road. Act II ends.
ACT III — The Warrant (Ch. 23–30, Day 9)
Ch. 23 — Day 9, dawn. Hutchins at the gate with paper: a warrant for
Cassie's arrest — evidence tampering, flight. Legally clean-looking. He's
alone but for one deputy in Hutchins's personal truck; no county car; the
route he names is the wrong direction for the county seat. She almost misses
it. Then she doesn't. (Kill intent stays off the page — dread by detail
only, per outline decision.)
Ch. 24. The gate stays shut. Ethan at the intercom — the mirrored image
of his sin, inverted: this time refusing to open it is the act of love.
Hutchins's mask slips one inch. Siege begins: he can't storm a fortress
alone, so he cuts what he can (road, the last utilities, patience) and
waits for reinforcement he can control. Change: open confrontation.
Ch. 25. Siege interior: fear metabolized differently by two people who've
each spent the book learning the other's kind of courage. The plan: every
camera at the gate is recording, and everything is streaming out through
Julian's backdoor to the lawyer and a state investigator — the surveillance
born of the worst night of his life, aimed at last in the right direction.
Pull: the trap needs Hutchins to incriminate himself.
Ch. 26 — DECIDED. The Dot gambit: Dot feeds Hutchins misinformation —
and he swallows it whole, because it never crosses his mind that he could be
fooled by a woman like that. His contempt is the vulnerability; the trap is
built from his own blind spot. (Shape in draft: Dot "cooperates" — worried
chatter that plants the wrong route, the wrong timing, or word that Cassie is
about to run — steering him into acting in front of the cameras.)
Change: the trap has its hinge; his arrogance loads the spring.
Ch. 27 — Crisis. Hutchins forces the endgame — power cut, gate breached
or bluffed open using Dot. Cassie's stand: she walks toward the cameras, not
away — makes him say it, do it, in frame. The confession/attempt lands on the
stream. The defining beats: she stopped running; the gate did its job by
being open — evidence flowing out, not iron holding shut.
Ch. 28. Cavalry and collapse: state police (lawyer + Julian's stream +
the investigator planted in Ch. 16). Hutchins taken — not shot, taken; the
banal handcuffed end corrupt men deserve. Deputy flips on him in the
driveway. Change: the external question answered on camera.
Ch. 29. Aftermath, close range: statements, the compound full of
strangers with badges — and Ethan calm in a crowd for the first time.
Cassie and the recording of what she survived. Grief for Danny arrives now
that it's safe to feel it. Change: the internal costs paid on the page.
Ch. 30. Two weeks later. The reckoning in Miller's Bend compressed to
what touches her: the diner, the funeral she can finally attend, people who
say her name like an apology. Ethan leaves the compound — first time in two
years — and it's ordinary: he drives her down the mountain for coffee, in
daylight. The image that answers Ch. 1.
Epilogue — Spring. The gate, open. Not for an emergency. Just open.
(Girlfriend's name spoken once here, in peace — if the author names her.)
HEA.
---
Drafting flags
- Ch. 14 is the book's most delicate chapter: his account of her death
stays plain and unsentimental — no method detail, no staging; the weight is
in the locked gate and the silence, and in Cassie receiving it.

 Ch. 22 (decided): Ethan learns of the backdoor live and is furious —
play the anger honestly, then let necessity override it. Friendship repair
can land in Ch. 29–30, brief.
 Ch. 25/28: the stream's destination is the State AG's office — the case
Danny died trying to deliver, delivered. Keep that beat explicit.
 Day math: sheriff locates her Day 7–8, arrives Day 9 — honors "at least
six days." If Act II-A needs air, add a Day 5.5 chapter; the clock flexes.
 Ch. 7/10/13 memory shards: keep each shard shorter than the reader wants —
the withholding is the engine.

At this point, you can just tell your agent to write each chapter. And even have them or another one critique the work.