chinese-novelist

// Overview

chinese-novelist is an Agent Skill for long-form Chinese fiction. Installed into Claude Code or another coding agent that reads `SKILL.md`, it turns "使用 chinese-novelist 帮我写一部小说" ("use chinese-novelist to write me a novel") into a staged project: a short interview about genre, protagonists and core conflict, a planning pass that produces an outline, character files and a machine-readable writing plan, and then an unattended run that writes every chapter to its own Markdown file. The repository describes the target as a complete 10–50 chapter novel, with 3,000–5,000 characters per chapter.

The work is split into numbered phases, each with its own instruction file under `references/flows/`. Phase 0 loads the writer's saved preferences and checks for an unfinished project to resume. Phase 1 asks three required questions, then optional deeper ones (world, point of view, theme, audience, chapter count) and proposes a title; every question can be skipped or randomised. Phase 2 shows the plan for confirmation, and the writer picks a mode: one agent writing chapter after chapter, parallel sub-agents writing in batches, or Claude Code Agent Teams for longer books.

Phase 3 writes without further prompts. For each chapter the skill analyses what the chapter needs, drafts it, runs a polishing pass meant to strip stock "AI-flavoured" phrasing, checks the length and appends a summary to a running chapter digest that later chapters read for continuity. Phase 4 then checks the whole manuscript for word count and coherence and rewrites failing chapters, up to three rounds. Version 2.3 added a style-baseline file (a style fingerprint, reference paragraphs and a list of phrasings to avoid) and a glossary to stop names and terms drifting between chapters; v2.3.1 added a fact-ledger rule and a quantified AI-flavour check.

Everything the skill produces is plain files in a dated project folder (outline, character profiles, writing plan JSON, style baseline, chapter summaries and one file per chapter), so a draft can be read, edited or continued in any editor. A small Python script, `scripts/check_chapter_wordcount.py`, does the length checks. The README and prompts are in Simplified Chinese, and the skill writes Chinese fiction only.

// Getting started

chinese-novelist is a skill folder, not an app: it runs inside a coding agent that reads `SKILL.md` (the README targets Claude Code). Prompts and output are Simplified Chinese.

npx skills add PenglongHuang/chinese-novelist-skill

git clone https://github.com/PenglongHuang/chinese-novelist-skill ~/.claude/skills/chinese-novelist

使用 chinese-novelist 帮我写一部小说

Commands and code are distilled from the project's own documentation — always check the official repo for the latest.

// When to use it

• Drafting a complete Chinese web novel (mystery, romance, fantasy, sci-fi, wuxia, historical) from a one-line idea
• Producing an outline, cast and chapter plan to revise by hand before any prose is written
• Running a long serial unattended with parallel sub-agents, then resuming it in a later session
• Studying how a multi-phase writing workflow can be encoded as a skill with plain Markdown and JSON state

// How chinese-novelist compares

chinese-novelist alongside other open-source writing & marketing tools AI/TLDR tracks, ranked by GitHub stars.