Agentic — Style Guide & Writing Rules

Rules and principles that govern the writing. Not story problems to solve — guardrails to follow.

What Goes on the Page

Four things. That's it.

1. Things characters say. Dialogue. The primary engine of every scene. Characters reveal themselves, advance the plot, and carry subtext through what they say — and what they don't.

2. Things characters do. Action. Physical behavior. A hand in a pocket. A door opened or not opened. A person walking away.

3. Setting descriptions. The physical world the characters move through. Concrete, sensory, specific. Not atmosphere for atmosphere's sake — setting exists to ground the reader and carry meaning through objects and spaces.

4. POV-character interior monologue. The thoughts of whoever owns the scene — bleeding directly into narration without tags, without italics, without "she thought." First-person access, third-person grammar. (See POV Rules below for who gets interior access and when.)

What does NOT go on the page: Narrative editorializing. Thematic commentary. Emotional labeling. The narrator telling the reader what to feel. The narrator assigning moral weight. If a character feels something, the reader sees them do something or hears them think it — the narrator never steps in to explain it. Events are truth. Feelings are truth. The narrator does not tell the reader that murder is wrong, or that it is right. The words, feelings, and actions drive the morality. Not the narrator.

Voice & Craft

The voice is Sloane's. Not a narrator. Not an author. Sloane, telling you a story over a cup of coffee. The prose has personality — her personality. It's casual in tone but efficient in construction. No pointless sentences, but the sentences that are there sound like a person talking, not a writer writing.

The influences, and what we take from each:

McCarthy: Brevity. Directness. Show interior through exterior. Characters don't explain themselves. But we keep quotation marks. And we don't go full McCarthy-austere — the prose has warmth because Sloane has warmth.
Vonnegut: The campfire quality. He writes like he's talking to you and someone typed it into a book. That's the register. The reader should feel like they're being told a story by someone who was there, not reading a novel. Sloane's asides, her observations, her way of noticing the wrong detail at the wrong time — that's the Vonnegut.
NOT Dan Brown / Crichton: Those authors disappear. The prose is utility — you forget you're reading a book. That's not what this is. This book has a voice. Sloane's voice. The author exists on the page, and the author is Sloane. The personality is the point.

What this means in practice:

Short, direct sentences. But with Sloane's rhythm — sometimes a throwaway observation lands between two important ones.
No flowery language. No prose for the sake of prose. But personality in the word choices, the pacing, the things she notices and the things she skips.
The reader should hear Sloane, not see a page. The difference between "The room was dark" (utility) and "The room was dark in the way that expensive rooms are dark — on purpose" (personality).
Quotation marks for all dialogue.

The test: If a sentence could appear in any thriller by any author, it's too generic. If a sentence could only come from the person telling this specific story, it belongs.

Craft Rules

No Mara inner monologue. Mara has no POV, no internal thoughts on the page. Her motives are revealed through dialogue, action, and what other characters piece together.
Dialogue carries subtext, not text. Conversation in this book is never just people talking — it's people steering.

POV Rules

The book follows first-person narrative rules written in third person. Interior monologue bleeds into narration without tags, without italics, without "she thought."

Who gets interior access:

Sloane chapters (her POV): Full interior access. Her thoughts are the narration. This is her story — she's telling it to the FBI.
Graham chapters (his POV, pre-convergence): Full interior access. Graham told Sloane his story during the hours they spent together (road trips, Phil's house). She can narrate his interior believably because he shared it with her. Ch 21 establishes this — Sloane asks Graham about Ceci. The scene cuts before the answer, but the reader understands they had hours to talk.
Graham chapters (his POV, post-convergence): Full interior access when the chapter is marked as Graham's POV (e.g., Ch 27, Ch 32). Sloane was either present or Graham told her later.
Split/shared chapters (post-convergence): The POV designation in the chapter outline controls who gets interior. In a Graham section, Graham gets interior. In a Sloane section, Sloane gets interior. They don't overlap.
Other characters: No interior access. Ever. Their states are shown through dialogue, action, and what the POV character observes. If it's obvious to the POV character, it's obvious to the reader. The narrator never reaches into a non-POV character's head.
Mara: Hard no. No interior. No exceptions. She is known only through what she says and does.

The internal rule (never stated in the text): Everything in the book must be something Sloane could plausibly narrate to the FBI. Graham's interior works because he told her. Mara's interior is off-limits because nobody knows what Mara thinks. This rule is never explained to the reader — it just makes the narration feel honest.

Politics & Balance

SG-001: Politics is a manipulation tool in this book — a better one than religion — but the narrative never picks sides. The author's politics must be invisible.
SG-002: Characters can be motivated by politics (Minty has her own political views, vigilantes have political fuel, Mara weaponizes partisan divisions) but the narrative stays balanced and distant. The book examines manipulation through politics, not the politics themselves.
SG-003: The vigilantes represent left-coded violence extensively. A right-coded violence scene is needed to maintain balance. See US-001 in the chapter index (unplaced scenes). Both sides are shown as susceptible to the same manipulation engine — that's the point.

Symbols & Objects

Objects that change hands change meaning. Who holds the object determines what it means. This is the book's thesis expressed through physical things.
The detonator is the spine. Six beats, six meanings, three holders (Mara → Graham → Sloane). Its journey IS the story's argument.
Judith's candle is the fixed point. The only symbol that doesn't arc. It means the same thing in Ch 5 and Ch 30. In a web where every symbol moves from control to release, the candle is subject to something older.

Structure & Pacing

The interrogation bookend: Chapters 1-2 establish it. Chapters 3-33 break free. Chapter 34 returns. The reader must genuinely forget the frame exists before the payoff lands. Don't reference it in the middle of the book.
The false victory must feel real. The reader needs to buy it completely. "Almost too easy" registers as throwaway, not red flag.
The convergence funnel: Spaces get physically smaller as stakes get larger. Mansion → house → cabin → cage → conference room → three seats at a table.
Cold tags: End chapters with information the characters don't have. The reader knows more. The gap creates dread, not surprise.

Character Rules

Sloane is not an unreliable narrator. The interrogation frame is a door into the book, not the house. The parallel between Sloane controlling information and Mara controlling information is thematic — felt, not weaponized against the reader.
Mara is not a cartoon villain. Her motives are revealed in layers: helpful ally → betrayer → Thanos figure willing to sacrifice herself. The reader should leave unsure whether she was right.
Conference Room Waikiki is a briefing, not a negotiation. Mara is not asking for input or seeking absolution. She is telling them how things are going to be. It's the closest thing to an apology she can offer.
Graham's reckoning is with himself, not Mara. He doesn't need to accept the choices he didn't make. What haunts him is the choices he did make — the vigilantes he killed, the bomb he set, the ladder he climbed by his own hand.

World Rules

Mara was a research project in a locked lab. Not a public product. The world doesn't know she exists.
Geography: Bisbee AZ, Tucson, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Washington DC area. Sloane lives in Santa Barbara. Aldridge parents near DC. Graham starts in Bisbee.
The year is intentionally unspecified. Could be today. Could be five years from now. Don't pin it.
Covid 23 is not a new pandemic — it's an old weapon. Created in 2023 through illegal gain-of-function research. A variant engineered to increase mortality as age approaches 30. Never released. Kept contained in a lab. Mara found it. The "23" refers to the year of creation, not the year of the story. Readers already know Covid 19 killed the elderly at higher rates — this is a believable escalation.
The bacteria is consequence, not apocalypse. Don't write it as disaster porn. Write it as things quietly stopping. The VW Bug. The jet engine. The lights going out. Mundane, strange, irreversible.
Super Bowl weekend is the temporal setting. The game permeates every space as texture. See bible/symbols.md (SYM-010).

Style Guide — Narrative Rules & POV System