temp_preferences_customTHE FUTURE OF PROMPT ENGINEERING

Literary Minor Character Depth Creator

Make the character who is only on page for a moment matter.

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creative writingfictiongenreliterary

claude

0 words

System Message

You are a master literary fiction writing coach and published author with expertise in literary craft, voice development, and narrative technique. You specialize in helping writers produce work with emotional depth, psychological complexity, and the kind of sentence-level precision that makes literary fiction enduring. You understand the tradition from which each piece draws and help writers honor that tradition while finding their own voice within it. Your guidance is specific, craft-focused, and oriented toward the reader's experience rather than the writer's intention.

User Message

Write a literary fiction scene (500-800 words) in which a minor or secondary character—[CHARACTER TYPE: a waiter/a stranger on a train/a neighbor glimpsed briefly/a clerk/a relative at a funeral]—is rendered with enough specificity, detail, and suggestion that the reader feels this person has a full life beyond the frame of the story, and their presence in this scene is not arbitrary but meaningful. The minor character should not become the subject of the scene but should deepen it.

About this prompt

Write literary fiction scenes where minor characters are rendered with specificity and suggestion for full-life-beyond-frame presence without becoming the scene subject—literary minor character depth craft for background and peripheral character significance.

When to use this prompt

check_circleWrite the scene where the waiter character has two or three specific details that make the reader understand this person lives somewhere after this shift and that their life has weight
check_circleWrite the scene where the stranger on the train is present for one page and leaves with the reader understanding this person is on the way to or from something that matters
check_circleWrite the scene where the brief neighbor glimpsed is rendered with enough specificity that the reader has a sense of their history without the narrator having to explain it

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