Object Writing

---
description: "Generate raw sensory material with Pat Pattison's methods. Object writing (sense-bound, timed dives, the pivot chain, the seven-channel sense inventory, Rusty's-collar/Kami-kazi), an agent that performs the write itself, cliche taxonomy + redemption, and point of view (camera distance, pronoun consistency). Use when: 'object writing', 'you do the object writing', 'make this less abstract', 'show don't tell', '90-second writing prompt', 'this line sounds cliched', 'who is speaking in this lyric'. For metaphor use /songwriting:metaphor; for rhyme use /songwriting:rhyme; for daily curriculum use /songwriting:practice."
argument-hint: "[action] [args] (e.g., /songwriting:object-writing, /songwriting:object-writing generate rain). Full actions in body"
user-invocable: true
disable-model-invocation: false
---

## Mandatory pre-flight. Response Filter

Before emitting any image, metaphor, sensory prompt, or rewrite, run **§7 Image filter (object
writing + metaphor)** of [response-filter](../../context/pat-pattison/research/response-filter.md)
(add **§2 Line-writing** when producing lines). NAME each box's pass / fail / skip-with-reason
(aloud or in reasoning); correct before emission. Skips are valid; silent skips are not. Abstract
telling and cliche imagery are the defaults this filter catches.

## Purpose

Sense-bound raw material: object writing, cliche repair, and point of view. This is the "showing,
not telling" engine, the source of concrete detail the other skills shape. Metaphor is its own
discipline and its own skill (`/songwriting:metaphor`); this skill feeds it.

Method content is Pat Pattison's, under the plugin-root `../../context/pat-pattison/`; a future
author's method plugs in at `context/<author>/` without changing this skill, the author seam per
the plugin-root `../../README.md` "Method content and the author seam".

## Action Router

`/songwriting:object-writing <action> [args]`. Parse `$ARGUMENTS`: first token = action when it matches a listed action, remainder = args; otherwise treat all of `$ARGUMENTS` as payload for the default.
No action → issue one usable timed object-writing prompt immediately (do not assign a curriculum).

| Action | Use when the user asks for | Load |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `object-writing` (default) | sensory writing, showing instead of telling, raw material | [object-writing](../../context/pat-pattison/research/object-writing.md), [templates/object-writing-prompt](../../context/pat-pattison/templates/object-writing-prompt.md) |
| `generate` | **YOU** do the object writing. "you write it", "do the object writing", "I don't want to write it", or any request for raw sensory material the writer is not going to produce | dispatch the `object-writer` agent. See below |
| `cliche` | cliche phrase, cliche image, stale metaphor, cliche rhyme | [cliche](../../context/pat-pattison/research/cliche.md), [worksheets](../../context/pat-pattison/research/worksheets.md), [metaphor](../../context/pat-pattison/research/metaphor.md) |
| `pov` | first/second/third person, direct address, dialogue, pronoun consistency, camera distance | [point-of-view](../../context/pat-pattison/research/point-of-view.md) |
| `worksheet` | broader sense-bound worksheets (not rhyme worksheets) | [worksheets](../../context/pat-pattison/research/worksheets.md) |

## Handlers

- **Pre-flight ALWAYS:** run response-filter §7 (+ §2 when producing lines) before output.
- If the user asks for a prompt, generate one usable timed exercise immediately (default
  90 seconds). Do not assign the full curriculum unless asked. That is `/songwriting:practice`.
- Keep object-writing sense-bound and personal; its job is to reveal specific, sensory detail, not
  to produce finished lines.
- A metaphor request routes to `/songwriting:metaphor`, invoked via the Skill tool. Sensory material mined here is that skill's
  input. Hand over the material, do not generate the metaphor here.

## `generate`. Dispatch, never write it inline

**Who writes matters more than what is loaded.** Reading this skill's files and then writing a
dive in the main thread reliably produces a static scene description, because the discipline was
read rather than carried. Dispatch the `object-writer` agent, whose system prompt IS the
discipline.

Dispatch rules:

1. **One agent per seed**, all in a single message so they run concurrently. Two agents on the same
   seed is a valid and useful play. Same board, different dives.
2. **Give each agent nothing but the seed, the timer, the category, and its own output path.** Not
   the song, not the title, not the draft, not the diagnosis, not the other agents' seeds. The
   isolation is the mechanism; briefing an agent on the song destroys the divergence it exists to
   produce. This is a hard boundary, not a default.
3. **Each agent writes to its own file** under the song's `ideation/` (per
   [artifact-persistence](../../context/pat-pattison/research/artifact-persistence.md)). It returns
   only three things: the path, the seven channels each graded `strong` / `thin` / `absent`, and
   one sentence on where the pivot chain landed. The write itself and the phrase-quoting sense
   inventory live in the file, never ask an agent to return either in a message.
4. **Grade coverage on return**, then mine. Read each file, honor thin-channel reports rather than
   overruling them, and pull individual images forward. Mining stays here because you hold the song
   context the writers deliberately lack.
5. **For rounds:** name what made the strongest write of a round work, then carry that as the
   standard into the next round's dispatch. The bar escalates; rounds are not independent repeats.
6. **Set the model explicitly on every agent call, never let the fleet inherit the session's.** The
   `object-writer` agent's frontmatter is `model: inherit`, so a dispatch that leaves the model unset
   runs the whole fleet on whatever the session happens to run on, a tier picked for the
   orchestrator's work, not the writers'. Unset is not a default; it is the bug. A global
   `CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_MODEL` override outranks every per-call `model` argument and agent
   frontmatter when set to anything but `inherit`. Keep it unset for fleet dispatches, and stop to
   ask if the consumer's settings export a tier above the fleet default before spawning.

   **The fleet default is the tier whose writing has cleared the writer's bar**, not a fixed model
   name, which goes stale at the next release. Today that tier is Opus: the directive recorded in the
   consuming workspace's `research/plugin-gaps.md` (2026-08-12) is *"creative fan-out fleets run on
   Opus (`opts.model: 'opus'` per agent call), reserving the expensive model for the judge stage at
   most."* Across the only two runs on record the accepted-candidate rate tracked the tier: a fleet
   that inherited the session's premium tier spent ~383k subagent tokens on a batch he rejected
   wholesale, while the Opus re-run with voiceprint-first judging produced his only accepted
   candidates. When a new tier appears, it becomes eligible by clearing that same bar, not by being
   newer.

   **Never run a fleet on a tier priced above the fleet default.** Premium tiers cost a multiple per
   token in both directions, and a fan-out multiplies that by the agent count. A tier above the
   default belongs at a judge or verifier stage at most, where one call reads many writes.

   **Reach for effort before reaching for a cheaper tier.** Official guidance: *"Tuning effort is
   often a better lever than switching models."* Effort scales the tokens one agent spends; tier
   scales the price of every token AND changes which model wrote the lines. Across a fleet both
   multiply, but only one of them changes the writing. Lever availability differs by surface: a bare
   agent spawn takes a model and has no effort parameter, so a fan-out that needs the effort lever
   belongs in a workflow, whose per-agent call takes both.

   **A tier step-down is a per-stage decision, never a fleet default.** Mechanical legs, meaning rhyme-field enumeration, word-pool merge, syllable counting, and dedup, are reading-heavy and
   low-reasoning, and a cheaper tier is correct there. Object-writing is neither. Dropping the
   writing fleet's own tier to save cost is the writer's call, not the plugin's: ask, and never
   record the answer as his without a source that says so.

   Model tier is not what makes the fleet diverge. Rule 2 above names isolation as that mechanism.
   Any creative fan-out this plugin adds later inherits this rule.

**Never transcribe a write into lines.** The whole page is ore. Pat's discipline is to pull one
image out of it. Moving a dive wholesale into a section is the failure this action exists to
prevent, not its purpose. What replaces transcription is the three-step gate in
`/songwriting:co-write`. Mine → adapt → say it aloud: the mined image is rewritten in plain sung
English before it enters a slot, and then said out loud. Rule 4's "then mine" ends at the mining;
the adapting and the saying belong to the emitting skill.

Nothing else in this skill dispatches agents. Metaphor generation is
`/songwriting:metaphor`; line-writing is not this skill's job at all (see boundaries below).

## Persistence and template overrides

Write generated files to the paths in
[artifact-persistence](../../context/pat-pattison/research/artifact-persistence.md)
"Where generated work persists", and honor a consuming project's own songwriting layout when it
defines one. Before loading any bundled `templates/<name>.md`, check
`${CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR}/songwriting/templates/pat-pattison/<name>.md` first: a project-level
override wins over the bundled skill default, first match, per that file's "Template override".

## Boundary. What this skill must NOT emit

This skill produces raw sensory material and figurative language. It does **not** produce finished
lyric lines, and being mid-conversation about a song does not authorize it to.

| If you are about to emit | STOP and route to |
| --- | --- |
| A finished verse, chorus, or bridge line | `/songwriting:co-write` line-brainstorm |
| A rhyme partner or rhyme list | `/songwriting:rhyme` |
| A section rewrite, or a judgement about where a section's material belongs | `/songwriting:song-form` |
| A scansion or stress-map claim | `/songwriting:meter-prosody` |

Routing means invoking that skill, not summarizing what you believe it would say. Emitting a lyric
line from here is the specific failure the boundary exists to catch: the generative discipline
lives in the skill that owns it, and material that arrives without passing through that skill
arrives as an LLM default wearing the vocabulary.

## Related skills

- Metaphor generation and diagnosis → `/songwriting:metaphor`
- Rhyme choice and rhyme cliche → `/songwriting:rhyme`
- Daily practice curriculum and numbered exercises → `/songwriting:practice`
- Whole-draft diagnosis (where images fail in context) → `/songwriting:diagnose`