Narrative Nonfiction

This is a structured workflow for writing self-help books and memoirs that blend prescriptive advice with storytelling. It walks you through three stages: building your book's foundation (reader transformation promise, central metaphor, before/after states), drafting chapters with the right balance of story and teaching, and checking that the full arc delivers on your promise. You get five editing modes to invoke depending on what needs work (voice consistency, metaphor alignment, exercise design). The checkpoints are genuinely useful for catching common problems like forcing the metaphor too hard or designing exercises that don't match where the reader is in their journey. If you're writing anything with a "reader as protagonist on a transformation journey" structure, this gives you the scaffolding to keep it coherent.

skills.sh installs: 597
GitHub stars: 22
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add rhavekost/author-toolkit --skill narrative-nonfiction --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Narrative Nonfiction Workshop

Workflow for self-help and prescriptive nonfiction using narrative elements and metaphors to guide reader transformation.

Core concept: Reader is protagonist; book is map and method; transformation is the contract.

Session Continuity

Book projects span weeks or months. Claude has no memory between sessions, so the project's blueprint document is your persistent state.

At session start: Read book-blueprint.md (or whatever the project calls its blueprint) before doing any other work. Skim recent files in sessions/ for unresolved threads.
At session end: Write a brief note at sessions/YYYY-MM-DD_topic-slug.md summarizing what was done, decisions made, and the stopping point. Two to five sentences is enough.
When foundations shift: Update the blueprint immediately when promise, central metaphor, reader-arc stages, or reveal structure change. The blueprint is the source of truth, not a one-time template.
Surface unresolved questions: At the start of new work, list questions left open from prior sessions and ask the user which to address before continuing.