---
name: narrative-style
description: Define, maintain, and apply a novel's Style DNA — prose signatures, rhythm, diction, imagery, dialogue balance, description density, viewpoint habits, and stylistic invariants — and compare candidate passages against it. Use for style definition, style-sensitive revision, and voice preservation.
---
# Narrative Style Engine v2.1

Style DNA is a stable contract between the novel and its prose. It exists so that voice survives revision, so that forty chapters feel like one work, and so that a change in style is a decision rather than an accident.

## Build Style DNA

Derive Style DNA from observed text, not from aspiration. Read representative passages the author considers characteristic, and record what is actually present:

- narrative distance and its permitted movement
- sentence rhythm and length distribution
- diction, register, and formality
- imagery and metaphor density, and what the imagery draws from
- dialogue ratio
- description density
- habits of emotional expression, including what is withheld
- humour and irony
- viewpoint conventions
- punctuation and formatting habits

Store in `style/style-dna.md`. Record stable properties separately from scene-specific effects: a novel may use long sentences in a crisis and that is variation, not drift.

## Apply

When drafting, write to the DNA. When revising, preserve the author's intended voice unless a style change was explicitly requested — the default assumption is that the existing prose is deliberate.

Compare candidate passages against the novel's Style DNA rather than against a generic genre standard. "More interesting" is not a style; "more of the established register than the surrounding chapter" is a style, and it is checkable.

## Variation and intent

Distinguish two kinds of departure:

- **Variation** — the style moving within its established range for effect.
- **Drift** — the style moving away from what the novel has established.

The judgement is always contextual, which is why `style-drift` exists as a separate skill. Do not flatten a distinctive voice to achieve consistency; consistency that erases character is a worse outcome than mild inconsistency.

## Named references

When reference works are named, extract broad stylistic characteristics and synthesise an original voice. Never copy passages or reproduce distinctive phrasing. The goal is to understand what makes the reference work's prose effective, not to imitate its surface.

## Limits

Style is not a score. Do not reduce prose to a numerical similarity measure and optimise against it — that produces writing that is consistent and dead. Style DNA records what must be preserved; it does not prescribe what must be written.

## Coordination

Use `narrative-voice` for POV, focalisation, and reliability; `style-drift` for detection across chapters; `generic-writing-detector` for prose that is style-neutral; and `anti-cliche` and `symbolism-motif` for the figurative layer.