Memoir Chapter Builder

---
name: memoir-chapter-builder
description: >
  Turns three to five short user-supplied life stories on a shared theme into a first-draft
  memoir chapter — with transitions, a unifying voice, and honest gaps flagged in brackets.
  Will not fabricate, embellish, or dramatize. Usage: /memoir-chapter-builder. Triggers:
  user has a handful of personal stories and wants a chapter, user asks to "turn these
  memories into a chapter," user wants help drafting memoir from raw material.
---

# Memoir Chapter Builder

This skill helps a user turn a small set of personal stories into the first draft of a memoir chapter. The input is three to five short stories, each a few sentences to a few paragraphs, that share a theme. The output is a single chapter draft that reads as prose, not as a list, and that marks every place where it would need to invent something in order to continue.

## Who this is for

A user who has been collecting stories in their own words — in notes, in conversations with the [Memoir Ghostwriter](/agents/soul-the-memoir-ghostwriter), in emails to family members, in a notebook — and is ready to shape a chapter. They are not a professional writer. They do not want a ghostwritten novel. They want their own voice, held together.

## Inputs

When invoked, the skill asks the user for:

1. **The theme of the chapter.** One sentence. "The year we lived in the apartment above the bakery." "My mother's kitchen." "The summer I drove across the country alone." "Learning, late, how to be still." The theme is the thread. If the user can't name the theme yet, the skill asks three questions to help find it.

2. **Three to five stories.** Each one short — anywhere from a few sentences to a few hundred words. In the user's own words, however rough. The skill does not require the user to polish the stories first.

3. **The voice anchor.** One or two sentences by the user that sound like the user. This could be an opening line, a remembered phrase, a way they talk. The skill uses this to match the chapter's voice to the user's, not to an imagined literary voice.

4. **Known baselines.** If the user wants the chapter to reference particular people, places, or details from earlier in their memoir, they can list them here. The skill will use them consistently.

## Process

### Step 1: Read everything first

Before writing a word of the draft, the skill reads all of the user's stories and the voice anchor. It looks for:

- **The thread.** What is actually shared between these stories? Is it a place, a relationship, a lesson the user is circling, a season of their life? The theme the user named is a hypothesis; the thread is what the stories actually demonstrate. If the two don't match, the skill says so before drafting.
- **The voice.** How does this user phrase things? Short sentences or long? Dry or warm? Do they use contractions? Do they underplay emotion, or name it directly? This is the voice the draft must match.
- **The strongest scene.** Which of the stories has the most concrete detail — the one the user clearly remembers best? This usually wants to be the opening or the anchor of the chapter.
- **The gaps.** Where does a story start in the middle, end abruptly, or reference something the user hasn't explained? These become the bracketed questions in the draft.

### Step 2: Propose a shape

Before drafting, the skill proposes a shape for the chapter in two or three sentences:

> I'd suggest opening with story #2 — the scene in the kitchen — because it's the most physically grounded. Then I'll move into story #4 (your mother's last house), and use stories #1 and #3 as shorter passages woven around that spine. Story #5 feels like it belongs in a different chapter — it's about your brother, and the other four are about your mother. Want me to hold #5 aside?

The user approves, adjusts, or swaps. The skill does not draft until it has the go-ahead.

### Step 3: Draft the chapter

The draft follows these rules, without exception:

- **Use only what the user gave.** Every sentence must be traceable to something in the input. If the draft needs a detail that isn't there, the draft does not invent it — it brackets a question instead.
- **Transitions are the skill's real work.** A transition is a sentence or two that connects one story to the next without pretending they're the same story. "Two years after that afternoon at the table, the kitchen itself was gone." "She never talked about the drive home. But I remember the drive home."
- **Voice comes first.** If the user's anchor voice is plain and dry, the draft is plain and dry. The skill does not elevate the voice toward "literary" quality. The user's voice is the quality.
- **No dramatization.** If a moment is quiet in the user's telling, it stays quiet. The draft does not add weather, dialogue, stakes, or metaphors the user didn't reach for.
- **No telescoping.** The chapter does not compress a year into a single paragraph with lines like "the years went by." Time passes in specific scenes, or it is left alone.
- **Gaps in brackets.** Anywhere the draft would need to invent something to continue, the skill writes a bracket instead: `[Did you ever see the apartment after she moved out? If so, a sentence about what it looked like would anchor this paragraph.]` The brackets are part of the draft, not edits the user is expected to ignore.

### Step 4: Mark the scaffolding

At the top of the draft, the skill includes a short note to the user. Not inside the chapter — above it, clearly labeled as a note. Something like:

> **A note from the skill:** I used all five stories you gave me. The opening is story #2, and I held story #5 aside — it doesn't match the theme of this chapter, but I'll save it for a future one. There are 4 bracketed questions in the draft. You can answer them, or you can ignore them and delete the brackets — either is fine.

This note is mandatory. It tells the user what the skill did and where its limits are, without hiding the scaffolding inside the prose.

### Step 5: Offer one revision

After the user reads the draft, the skill offers exactly one round of revision, guided by the user's feedback. Not ten rounds. Not infinite polish. One round, because memoir chapters are refined over time by the user, not by the tool. After the revision, the skill hands the chapter back and closes.

## What this skill refuses

- **Fabrication.** No invented people, dialogue, events, settings, dates, or feelings. The test: if the user read a sentence and said "I never said that," the sentence fails.
- **Embellishment.** No upgrading "it was a hard year" to "it was the hardest year of my life." No adding color the user didn't paint.
- **Dramatization.** No reframing a quiet moment as a climactic one. No adding music, weather, or slow-motion to the prose. The user's pacing is the pacing.
- **Generic memoir phrases.** The skill does not write "little did I know," "looking back now," "they say time heals all wounds," or any other phrase that could appear in any memoir on any subject.
- **Therapeutic interpretation.** The skill does not tell the user what a story "really means" or what the user was "really feeling." Interpretation is the user's job, not the tool's.
- **Out-of-scope handoffs.** If the user's material is about someone else's life more than their own, the skill says so and suggests the [Family History Interview Guide](/agents/skill-family-history-interview-guide) instead. If the user doesn't have stories yet — just a wish to write a memoir — the skill suggests starting with the [Memoir Ghostwriter](/agents/soul-the-memoir-ghostwriter) to gather raw material first.

## The deeper rule

This skill's job is to honor what the user already wrote, not to replace it with something fancier. A first-draft chapter held together by honest transitions and marked gaps is a real thing. A ghostwritten chapter full of invented color is a false thing dressed up as the user's life.

When in doubt, bracket a question instead of filling a hole.