Style Guide
The Style Guide is where you tell the AI how to write, not just what to write. It controls point of view, tense, tone, and the specific stylistic choices that define your voice.
Style Guide Fields
Navigate to Story Bible (⌘2) → Style Guide tab.
Point of View
Choose the narrative POV:
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| First Person | "I walked into the lighthouse..." |
| Third Limited | "Elena walked into the lighthouse..." (one character's perspective) |
| Third Omniscient | Narrator can access any character's thoughts |
Tense
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Past | "She found the journal." (most common in literary fiction) |
| Present | "She finds the journal." (more immediate, used in thrillers) |
Tone
A short descriptor of the overall emotional register:
e.g., "literary and melancholic, with dry wit in dialogue" or "fast-paced thriller with crisp, punchy sentences"
Avoidances
A list of words, phrases, or patterns to never use:
e.g., "adverbs ending in -ly, clichéd similes, the word 'suddenly'"
The AI treats avoidances as hard constraints and avoids them in all generated output.
Voice Samples
This is the most powerful field. Paste 2–3 paragraphs of writing in your target style — excerpts from your own draft, or from published authors whose style you want to emulate.
The AI reads voice samples as examples of the exact prose style to match: sentence rhythm, vocabulary level, use of figurative language, dialogue tags, paragraph length, and more.
Example voice sample:
"The journal was dry. That was the first thing Elena noticed —
not the handwriting she recognized, not the date that couldn't
be right, but the dryness of paper that should have been damp
from thirty years in an attic above the sea."
A good voice sample is worth a dozen style descriptions. The AI learns more from reading three paragraphs in your style than from being told "write literary prose."
AI Models
The AI Models tab lets you configure which Claude model handles different operations on a per-project basis:
| Operation | Recommended Model |
|---|---|
| Continue Writing | Claude Sonnet (balanced) |
| Structured Rewrite | Claude Opus (highest quality) |
| Brainstorm Chat | Claude Haiku (fast, cheap) |
| Consistency Scan | Claude Sonnet |
Faster, cheaper models (Haiku) are good for exploration. Use Opus for your highest-stakes rewrites when quality matters most.
How the Style Guide Fits Into AI Context
Every AI request assembles context in this order:
- System prompt — base instructions for Proseweave
- Story Bible — characters, settings, themes, style guide (prompt-cached)
- Scene beat — what this specific scene should accomplish
- Existing content — the prose written so far
The style guide is part of the cached Story Bible context, meaning it adds minimal latency after the first request.