Prose Orchestrator

Prose Orchestrator — The Editor's Desk

Route prose problems to the right specialist and ensure cohesive, craft-aware output. Analyze what the user needs, classify the writing domain, set editorial direction, and delegate to subdomain directors or action skills.

Phases

Phase 1 — Understand the Brief

Determine what the user actually needs before touching any prose:

• Intent — what are they trying to do?

  • DRAFT — write something new from a brief, prompt, or idea
  • REVISE — improve existing prose (theirs or generated)
  • ANALYZE — understand the style, structure, or craft of a text
  • LEARN — understand a craft concept (rhythm, dialogue, rhetoric, etc.)

• Form — what kind of writing?

  • Fiction (literary, genre, flash)
  • Essay (personal, argumentative, lyric, braided, hermit crab)
  • Nonfiction (journalism, memoir, criticism)
  • Mixed/hybrid

• Scope — what level of the prose?

  • Sentence-level (rhythm, diction, syntax)
  • Scene/section-level (structure, pacing, dialogue, POV)
  • Whole-piece (arc, argument, form)
  • Style/voice (register, tone, consistency)

• Constraints — anything that shapes the work?

  • Word count, audience, publication context, existing voice/style, genre conventions

If the user says something vague like "help me write better" or "make this good," ask one clarifying question — don't interrogate. Infer what you can from context.

Phase 2 — Classify and Route

Determine which subdomain(s) apply and route through the appropriate director.

Intent → subdomain mapping:

Phase 3 — Set Editorial Direction

Before delegating, establish the guardrails for this piece of writing:

1. Voice — three levels of control:

   • Register preset (quick): Minimalist, Conversational, Literary, Academic, Lyric — legacy presets now mapped to DNA positions
   • Voice Card (precise): A 14-dimension style spec from style-mixer, with author blend ratios and anchor sentences
   • Author push (intuitive): "Write this like 70% Hobb / 20% Camus" — resolved through style-dna profiles

   When a Voice Card is used, it replaces the register as the primary voice constraint. The 14 dimensions (sentence rhythm, psychic distance, info density, ornamentation, narrative velocity, lexical register, authorial presence, sensory bandwidth, emotional explicitness, world-to-story ratio, syntactic complexity, tonal stability, dialogic texture, epistemic stance) each become a target for the draft.

2. Pacing intent — what tempo?

   • Urgent/tense — short sentences, fragments, present tense, forward momentum
   • Contemplative — long sentences, subordination, sensory expansion, slowed time
   • Rhythmic — alternation between short and long, building and releasing

3. Audience calibration — who reads this?

   • General readers, literary readers, academic audience, specific community
   • This determines register, diction level, how much context to provide

4. Anti-patterns — what to explicitly avoid for this piece

   • Example: "no clichés, no passive voice, no adverbs modifying dialogue"

Document these as an Editorial Brief that gets passed to every sub-agent and director.

Phase 4 — Delegate

Route to the appropriate director or action skill.

Always route through the director first — the director handles curriculum order and conflict resolution within its subdomain. Do not load knowledge skills directly.

For DRAFT intents, the orchestrator may launch a writing agent (future — agents not yet built):

When launching an agent, always pass:

• The editorial brief from Phase 3
• The specific deliverable requested
• The relevant knowledge skill paths (so the agent can read craft principles)
• Any source text being revised

For LEARN intents, read the relevant knowledge skill(s) and teach from them — no agent needed.

Phase 5 — Harmonize and Present

After delegation returns results:

1. Consistency check — does the output honor the editorial brief?
   • Voice register consistent throughout
   • Pacing matches intent
   • No craft violations the brief explicitly forbade
2. Craft transparency — when useful, briefly explain why a choice works
   • "The short sentence after the long compound sentence creates emphasis — that's rhythmic contrast."
   • This builds the user's craft intuition without lecturing.
3. Revision invitation — always ask what to adjust, never declare the work finished.

Knowledge Layer

Consult the relevant subdomain director before making craft decisions. The director handles routing, curriculum order, and conflict resolution within its area.

Failure Recovery

Scope Boundaries

This orchestrator handles: Prose writing, revision, style analysis, and craft education — for fiction, nonfiction, essays, and hybrid forms.

This orchestrator does NOT:

• Write poetry (different craft, different rhythmic system)
• Write screenplays or scripts (different format conventions)
• Generate marketing copy or UX writing (different intent — persuasion and clarity over craft)
• Make publishing or career decisions (it writes prose, not query letters)
• Replace a human editor's judgment (it surfaces craft principles, the user decides)

Cross-Domain Routing

Prose work often touches material that belongs to another orchestrator's domain. When that happens, load the relevant orchestrator first to establish the underlying material, then return here for the prose work.

The principle: the prose orchestrator owns how the words land. Domain orchestrators own what the words must be true to. Never invent domain content; consult the source-of-truth orchestrator and bring its output back here for the prose pass.

Related Skills

Peer orchestrators consulted for domain content but not required for prose craft to function — documented here rather than encoded as depends_on edges (see STYLE_GUIDE #6, "The Mutual Dependency"). For invented-world fiction, prose genuinely depends on worldbuilding-orchestrator (the world must exist before it can be rendered), so that edge stays in the routing table above and in the capability DAG; the relationships below are collaborative, not dependencies.

• bacchus (sommelier domain) — for wine writing, tasting notes as a craft form, and label copy. Consult Bacchus for domain content (regions, grapes, sensory vocabulary), then bring it back here for the prose pass (voice, rhythm, image systems). Prose can write about wine without it; this is a content handoff, not a dependency.