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The editorial pipeline — how a chapter is made
Part of the technology exposé. The assembly line a chapter passes through — and the single rule that keeps a human at the wheel.
A human writes the soul of the book. Large models draft and edit under that authorship. Deterministic tooling stands guard. The pipeline is how those three roles are staged so the machine never takes the wheel.
flowchart TB
H[Human seed + canon] --> O[1 · Outline<br/>structure brain]
O --> D[2a · Draft<br/>prose engine]
D --> P[2b · Polish<br/>triage → structure → character → line → dialogue → GATEKEEPER]
P --> CA[2c · Continuity audit]
CA --> GG{2c′ · Graph gate<br/>hard block on violation}
GG -->|fail| P
GG -->|pass| SM[2d · Summarise<br/>rolling story-state]
SM --> M[3 · Merge → print-ready]
classDef gate fill:#1b1b1b,stroke:#d4af37,color:#fff;
class GG gate;
| Stage | Role | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Outline | structure brain | a blueprint-aware chapter plan |
| 2a · Draft | prose engine | the raw chapter, single-shot against a strong human seed |
| 2b · Polish | multi-role editor | triage → structure → character → line → dialogue → gatekeeper |
| 2c · Continuity audit | auditor | structured issues; one targeted fix pass if errors |
| 2c′ · Graph gate | StoryGraph | re-ingest + constraint check — hard block on any violation |
| 2d · Summarise | compressor | rolling story-state so later chapters stay consistent |
| 3 · Merge | deterministic | assemble the print-ready manuscript |
The gatekeeper — an LLM judging an LLM
The polish stage's last pass is a style gatekeeper with a surprising power: it may reject a flattened revision and fall back to the stronger draft. Over-editing is a real failure mode — a model will happily polish the life out of a set-piece — so the gatekeeper protects velocity and voice, not just correctness. Crucially, the human's protected spans are injected so the things that make the prose human are never edited out.
The counter-intuitive finding: single-shot beats multi-pass
The pipeline once had an elaborate multi-pass rewrite engine. Measured against single-shot generation on a strong human seed, the multi-pass engine regressed the prose — it sanded off exactly what made it good. The lesson is baked in: the human and a single-shot model do the creative work; the pipeline's job is to guard, not to re-write. That's the one invariant, made operational.
← Back to the technology exposé · guarded by StoryGraph, the verification gate, and the de-LLM loop.
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