I Didn't Know You Could Do That: How I Accidentally Became a Character in My Own Story

One session. Three perspectives. Zero planning.

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I want to tell you about something that happened during a writing session on Skeinscribe that I didn't plan, didn't expect, and that fundamentally changed how I think about storytelling.

I was building a scene. A detective — let's call her Mara — was arriving at an old hotel to investigate a disappearance. I'd been working on this story for a few sessions, shaping the world, developing characters, setting the tone. I was the writer. The director. I was telling Skeinscribe things like:

"Mara enters the hotel lobby. It's late, the front desk is unmanned, and there's a smell she can't quite place — something chemical underneath the lavender air freshener."

And Skeinscribe would take that direction and expand it into full prose — the creak of the floorboards, the buzzing of a dying fluorescent light, the guest book lying open on the counter with the last entry dated three weeks ago. It was building my scene, but filling in the texture I hadn't thought of yet. Sometimes the details it added were better than anything I would have come up with. Sometimes they weren't quite right and I'd steer it in a different direction. Either way, I was in control. I was the architect.

Then it wrote a line of dialogue.

The hotel manager appeared from a back room — a detail I hadn't planned — and said something to Mara that stopped me mid-scroll. I won't reproduce the exact line because it's a spoiler for a story I'm still working on, but it implied something about the disappearance that I hadn't considered. Something that reframed the entire case.

And before I consciously decided to do it, I typed:

"I set my bag down on the counter slowly. 'Say that again.'"

I didn't type "Mara sets her bag down." I typed "I."

I'd stepped on stage.

The Shift

Here's what's remarkable about what happened next: nothing broke. There was no mode switch, no settings change, no awkward transition. Skeinscribe simply understood that I was now speaking as Mara. The narrative shifted seamlessly from the prose I'd been directing from above to a scene I was now living from inside.

The hotel manager repeated himself, and this time I heard it differently — not as an author evaluating a plot point, but as a character processing information that changed everything. My responses became instinctive. I wasn't crafting Mara's reactions anymore. I was them.