Spec Kit preset Fiction Book Writing V1.5.0 is out with major enhancements #2260
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Here is a great example, i focused on a dialog scene in a dark humor scene: FA1.101 — ArrivalThe wardrobe door was four centimetres open. Paul had meant to do something about that before they arrived, but then they had arrived, and now it was a thing he was not doing something about. Claire was holding two glasses of something and smiling at the door. The room was warm in the way of rooms where a window had not been opened before guests arrived. The glasses were mismatched. Claire had done something with a coaster. There was a knock. Claire opened the door. "Anthony," she said. "Denise. Come in, come in, it's just right through, you remember—" She gestured at the flat, which was the whole flat. They came in. Anthony looked at the flat the way people look at a flat when they are making a determined effort not to look like they are doing that. He had on a jacket with the sleeves done up precisely right. His eyes found the corners without appearing to move. Denise looked at the flat the way someone looks at a room they have already finished assessing. She looked at it for half a second and then she was done with it. "Paul," Anthony said, locating him. "Anthony," Paul said. This completed their greeting. Claire was orbiting the kitchen doorway, toward it and not quite through it and back again, in a movement that suggested progress without producing anything. She still had the two glasses. She had also, at some point, produced a third glass that no one had asked for, which she was managing with one hand in the way of a person who has done this before. "Let me — can I take coats? Here. I'll put them. Paul, do you want to—" Paul looked at the coats. He did not want to. Claire collected them herself and went toward the bedroom with them in a way that implied this was not the last time she would make this kind of journey before the evening was over. Anthony stepped fully into the room and looked at it. He looked at it the way someone looks at a room they have just been given responsibility for and aren't sure about. The low table, already set with bottles and glasses, received a longer look than the chairs. So did the far wall with the wardrobe. He moved on from the wardrobe without stopping. Denise was already sitting. Anthony and Denise stood for a moment, surveying the available seating. There was a sofa that gave too much and two chairs that did not match each other. Denise sat on the sofa. Anthony looked at the sofa and sat in one of the chairs. Paul was already sitting. He was sitting with his knees near the table, which was slightly too low for him, but sitting required less explanation than standing. On the table in front of him were four glasses, arranged at intervals. He had arranged them while he was waiting. He was not sure how long he had been doing this or when he had started. "Sit anywhere," Claire called from somewhere toward the bedroom, which was redundant as a piece of advice. "We're sitting," Denise said, to the room rather than to Claire specifically. The wardrobe was against the far wall. It was just there, the way wardrobes are just there in rooms that haven't been redecorated since a particular furniture-buying moment. Its door was open about four centimetres. This was fine. The shadow at the gap was the shadow that a gap that size would produce. It was ordinary furniture in the position furniture ends up in, which is against a wall, with a door that didn't quite close all the way. Anthony had not looked at it. His assessment of the room had apparently concluded without the wardrobe requiring attention. Denise had looked at it once, briefly, which was as long as anything required. Nobody said anything. Claire came back in with a bottle, which she had also apparently retrieved from the bedroom, or from somewhere, and began to make a round. The bottle had no label. "I've got this one," she said. "Should I open the other now, Paul?" "Up to you," Paul said. "I'll hold off," she said. "For now. Denise, do you want some?" "Please," Denise said. She held out the glass that was clearly not for wine. It was the kind of tall, narrow glass that comes with a set of glasses designated for juice and is always left over when the other glasses are in use. Denise didn't appear to notice, or noticed and didn't find it worth noting. Claire poured. The wine went into the juice glass without comment. "Anthony," Claire said. Anthony held out his glass. Claire poured. She moved to Paul. "I'm fine," Paul said, and then looked at his glass, which was empty. "Actually—" Claire poured. "I was actually going to make something," Claire said, and her voice had the cheerful half-committed quality of someone making a social statement they know to be aspirational. "Food-wise. If anyone wants. There's something I was going to—" "Oh, don't go to any trouble," Anthony said. "No trouble," Claire said. "At all. Honestly." She sat down in the corner of the sofa that Denise wasn't in and tucked her feet up and looked at the room with satisfaction, which was the look of a person who had made something out of nothing and knew it and was quietly pleased. "So," Anthony said. He had settled, jacket not quite straight, looking at Paul with the expression of a man who has decided to perform an interest in what someone studies and is about to discover that he was wrong to. "What is it you're working on. The PhD." "Non-linear dynamics in social systems," Paul said. "Chaos theory," Anthony said. "That's what I said." Anthony looked at him. "No. What you said is a description of chaos theory. The field is called chaos theory." "The description is what the field is for," Paul said. "That's circular." "I know." Anthony appeared to think about whether this was an answer. It was not quite an answer. He adjusted his cuffs. Small neat movements, left then right. He settled his hands on his knees and looked at Paul with the air of a man who has the longer word count and is deciding whether to deploy it. "So what does it actually mean," he said, "in practice. The non-linear dynamics." Paul considered the glass in front of him. He had moved it since Claire poured it. It was now one and a half centimetres from where it had started. He was not going to explain this. "Well," Paul said. "A small example. Say you've got a closed system. Same number of components operating in the same configuration, and nothing unusual has happened to any of them." "Right," Anthony said, in the tone of someone being patient. "The system is stable because all the components are accounting for each other. Everyone knows what everything else is doing. Standard feedback loop." Paul picked up his glass and looked at it. "Then something changes that the components don't have a model for. And the feedback loop starts producing outputs it was never calibrated to produce." "Such as?" "That's the point. It's non-linear. The outputs are specific to the system. You can't predict them in advance, only describe them after. Different systems fail in different ways." Anthony appeared to consider whether this was interesting. He decided it was not quite interesting enough but that he would continue for social reasons. "What does that look like," he said, "in a social system specifically." "It means," Paul said, "that if you introduce a variable into a system that the system wasn't designed to account for, the system's responses stop being predictable. The model breaks down. Standard cause-and-effect stops applying." "That's a feature of all complex systems." "Yes, but the point is that the breakdown has a shape. It's not random. It follows a pattern the system generates from its own components, the same ones that were operating fine before. The instability is endogenous." "Endogenous," Anthony said. "You mean internal." "I mean generated from within," Paul said. "By the system itself. Not by outside interference." "That's—" Anthony started. He appeared to find the sentence and then set it down again. "All right. Go on." Paul had not particularly meant to go on. He had run out of wherever he was going with it. The silence opened and the silence had the texture of expectation, which was a particular kind of input a social system introduces to its own operating conditions, and he was thinking this when he said: "Take a dinner party. Small social system. Known components. The whole thing is designed to be self-regulating. Everyone knows the rules, everyone follows them, the evening proceeds in a predictable way from one beat to the next." He paused. "And then you introduce an unexpected body into the immediate environment." He had heard the sentence as it left him. He finished it anyway. "And the whole thing has to find a new equilibrium." Anthony said, "An unexpected body." "It's a technical term," Paul said. "In physics. Any object with mass. In a bounded—" "Yes," Anthony said. "I understand the term." He looked at Paul the way you look at a person who has said something carefully and wants you to believe they said it by accident. His expression was not hostile exactly. It was the expression of a man who has taken note of something and filed it. Paul looked at his glass. "So," he said. "So," Anthony said. The silence lasted about two seconds, which was long enough. Denise said, "How long have you been at it. The PhD." "Long enough," Paul said. "There's a lot of literature." "I'd imagine," she said. Anthony said, to his knees: "Bodies of literature." Paul looked at him. "Yes," Paul said. Another silence. Shorter this time. Then Anthony picked up his glass and took a sip and the silence closed over. "Can I top anyone up?" Claire said. She was already on her feet with the bottle. She came round and refilled Anthony's glass without waiting for an answer, then stood by the table looking at the available glasses and the arrangement of the room. Paul moved one of the glasses on the table. Two centimetres, leftward. He was aware of having done it approximately halfway through. He left it where it was. "Paul?" "I'm fine." "You're almost—" "I'm fine." Claire topped him up anyway and sat back down. "Anthony, how is the practice?" she said. "Are you still at the same surgery?" "Same surgery, yes," Anthony said. He set his glass down. He had things to say about the practice. The practice was a topic he had considered and had views on, and Claire had asked directly, which was an invitation he was not going to decline. "The work's been — well. It's been instructive. People have a very particular idea of what general practice is, and they're usually wrong." "Oh, I'm sure," Claire said. "The assumption is that it's reactive work. Symptom arrives, you respond, the patient leaves. But the actual work is diagnostic, really, in a systematic sense. You're not just responding to what's in front of you. You're looking at the pattern. The connections that the patient hasn't made yet. Things that seem unrelated that have a relationship if you know what to look for." "Isn't that interesting," Claire said. "Paul, isn't that—" "Chaos theory," Paul said. Anthony turned to him. "In a complimentary way," Paul said. "It is specifically not chaos theory," Anthony said, with the tone of a person who has been here before in this conversation and knows exactly where the exits are. "It is diagnosis. What I'm describing is the identification of a known pathology from an established array of indicators. The relationship between the indicators and the diagnosis is not non-linear. Well evidenced. It's the opposite of chaos." "The appearance of order emerging from—" "Paul," Claire said. "Sorry," Paul said. He was not sorry. He was looking at the table. He moved the glass back to where it had started, which turned out to be three centimetres from the second glass instead of three and a half. He left it there. The difference was not worth continuing. Claire said, "Anthony, do you still take it without—" "Yes," Anthony said. She reached across and topped his glass up. This completed something. She sat back and smoothed her skirt and looked at the room and appeared satisfied with it, or with the task of appearing satisfied with it, which came to the same thing. "It's very cosy," Denise said. "It is, isn't it," Claire agreed. "In winter especially. Although," she said, with a brief look at the window, "I should probably open the — at some point. Later. It's fine for now." The window stayed closed. The room stayed warm. The wardrobe door stayed four centimetres open, which was the position it had been in and would continue to be in, because that was the door's natural resting point and nothing had changed it. Anthony adjusted his cuffs again. This time it was not in advance of a statement, just a maintenance adjustment, a reflex operating on its own schedule. His sleeves were fine. He adjusted them anyway. He settled his hands back on his knees and looked at the far wall. Denise was watching, in the quiet way Denise watched things. Not obviously. Just present in the same room in a way that missed nothing. "Does anyone want anything?" Claire said. She was already in motion before she finished the question, a smooth pivot toward the kitchen doorway. "I was going to get something out. At some point." "We're fine," Denise said. "It's no trouble. I've got—" Claire paused, at the kitchen doorway, which was as far as she went. She appeared to take a brief inventory of what was in the kitchen that could be described as something and found the question inconclusive. "I'll bring something through," she said. "In a bit." She came back into the room and sat down. "Good," Anthony said. "Right." "Right," Paul said. They all had drinks. Nobody had identified what they were drinking. The wine, if it was wine, had the flavour of wine and the ambiguity of a bottle without a label, which was information enough for a dinner party at seven o'clock. Against the far wall, the wardrobe door was four centimetres open. It had been four centimetres open when Denise and Anthony arrived. It had been four centimetres open before they arrived. It had been four centimetres open for as long as Paul could remember, which was not, in this context, a long time, but was long enough. The shadow inside the gap was not moving. There were no sounds from it. It was a wardrobe. Wardrobes had doors that did not quite latch, when they were that kind of wardrobe, which this one was. The door being slightly open was not a condition of the wardrobe. It was the wardrobe's ordinary state. Denise was looking at the table. Her eyes had been to the wardrobe once and had not returned, which was the kind of precision that was either coincidence or something else. Anthony was describing a situation with his surgery's appointment system. He had a story about it that had a resolution, which he was working toward. He was about two-thirds through it. Claire was nodding along with the warmth of a person who is listening to a story and doing something else simultaneously, which in her case was monitoring the room: the glasses, the bottle, the door, and whether anyone needed anything. A continuous quiet background process that never entirely stopped. Paul sat with his glass and looked at the arrangement of the table. He had moved one glass twice. He put his hand near it and did not move it. He left it there, four centimetres from the nearest glass, and looked at the wall. "Which is why," Anthony said, "the sixteen-appointment-per-session model doesn't work in practice. Structurally." "Right," Paul said. "Sure." "The data doesn't support it," Anthony said, slightly louder, as though volume would help. "No," Paul said. "I believe you." Anthony looked at him to see if this was another thing he had said on purpose. It wasn't. Paul was looking at the table. "Well," Claire said. She stood up again with the bottle. "More?" Everyone held out their glass. She made the round. The room was warm. The evening had settled into the shape of an evening, the kind of shape that sits just inside comfortable: glasses out, conversation underway, the hour not too late yet, the particular quality of early in an evening when nothing has been asked of it yet. Against the far wall, the wardrobe door was four centimetres open. Nobody said anything about it. The evening had begun. |
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What's new in v1.5.0 — and a tour of the creative tools you might not be using
Hey everyone
v1.5.0 is out, and alongside the template and gate improvements in this release, I wanted to write a proper walkthrough of some of the commands that tend to get overlooked — particularly the creative session commands that sit outside the main planning → drafting pipeline.
What's new in v1.5.0
This release focused on the constitution and story structure documents and adding new commands. The main additions:
Constitution (
constitution.md)hybridprose profile — for books that intentionally shift tone between acts (e.g. grounded in Act I, gothic in Act III). Profile transitions are enforced only at structural boundaries, not mid-act.ToneandVocabulary Registerparameters in the Stylistic Parameters table, each with a documented option block (plain-colloquial,clinical-precise,literary-elevated,working-class-direct,bureaucratic-deadpan).speckit.checklistdoesn't flag them as errors.Spec (
spec.md)OQ-NNNitems you know you haven't resolved yet.Plan (
plan-template.md)themes.md/subplots.mdcompleteness.Audiobook-only mode guards —
speckit.polish,speckit.revise,speckit.continuity,speckit.checklist, andspeckit.statusall handle projects whereOUTPUT_MODE: audiobookand no prose draft exists yet, instead of throwing generic errors.Commands you might not be using — a tour
The preset ships with 26 commands, but most people settle into the
specify → constitution → plan → outline → implement → checklist → polishspine and leave the rest alone. Here's what you're missing.speckit.help— your workflow navigatorThis is the first command to run at the start of any writing session. It's not a documentation browser — it reads your actual project files, detects what state you're in, and tells you specifically what to do next and why.
The difference from
speckit.status:statusgives you numbers (word counts, task completion).helpreasons about your project — what's blocking you, what risk compounds if you ignore it, which command is the highest-value next action. Think of it as a senior editor who has read everything and is giving you opinionated advice rather than a report.speckit.brainstorm— structured ideation before you commit anythingMost people use this once at the start and forget about it. That's leaving most of its value on the table.
speckit.brainstormruns a question-driven loop over any story document — spec, plan, characters, themes, world-building, locations, timeline, POV, research, or series. It loads existing files as context so it doesn't ask you things you've already decided. You get:quick(~5 questions),standard(~10),deep(unlimited)speckit.brainstorm locations challenge) — instead of filling gaps, it stress-tests what you've already written. Good for catching assumptions you haven't questioned.The most underused pattern: run
speckit.brainstorm themes challengeafter you've finished your beat sheet. The questions will surface whether your thematic work is actually in the structure or just in your head.speckit.interview— talk to your charactersThe AI voices the character from their profile — vocabulary register, dialogue style, subtext patterns, arc state at the requested story point. You ask questions; the character answers as themselves.
This is not a scene from the book. It's a meta-conversation between author and character. The value is in what you discover: voice inconsistencies you haven't noticed, motivations that don't hold up under questioning, backstory gaps the character would know but you haven't written anywhere.
stressmode is particularly useful before Act II midpoints — push the character on their worst decision and see if the psychology holds.Session insights can be exported as a summary note to
characters/ornotes/to feed back intospeckit.brainstormorspeckit.revise.speckit.roleplay— live read-through with multiple perspectivesThis is the most powerful quality tool in the preset that almost nobody uses.
speckit.roleplaywalks through a scene beat by beat with multiple AI roles active simultaneously: the Author (craft perspective), a Lector (story logic and pace), each character present in the scene (voice and consistency), and optionally a Casual Reader (is this actually enjoyable). After each segment, the session pauses for Q&A. At the end, accumulated insights are written back as structured revision notes.Dialog Workshop mode (
dialog) segments by individual speaker turn instead of by beat. It activates the Subtext Tracker — a silent role that logs what each character is not saying after every line. If your dialogue is too on-the-nose, this will show you exactly where. You can also play a character yourself and have the AI respond as the other, which is the fastest way to find where dialogue goes dead.Tension Curve (
tension) adds a 1–10 tension score per segment at the end of the session, which integrates withspeckit.pacingif you run it afterward.speckit.audiobook— TTS production pipelineIf you've set
OUTPUT_MODE: audiobookorbothin your constitution, this command manages the full production pipeline.Supports SSML output (Azure TTS, Google Cloud TTS, Amazon Polly) and ElevenLabs voice IDs with a
.plspronunciation lexicon sidecar. Multi-speaker mode routes each character's dialogue to a distinct voice ID defined in the constitution's Speaker Configuration table.The lexicon export (
lexicon export) writes a W3C PLS file compatible with all supported TTS engines — useful if you're doing hybrid AI + human narration and need consistent pronunciation across both.Questions, feedback, and bug reports welcome below. If you've found a workflow or combination of commands that works well for your process, I'd like to hear about it.
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