Launching today
Open-Write
A development engine for creative narrative designers
4 followers
A development engine for creative narrative designers
4 followers
Open-Write is an open-source instrument for designing long-form stories — screenplays, novels, and television. The architect drives; the tool holds the structure, checks it, and renders the draft. Free under Apache 2.0.
I built this system initially just to experiment with working around the problems with long-form content generation by LLMs. After getting results that surprised me, I realized that we were on the verge of drastic changes in the narrative production market, probably sooner than most people realized. I'm hoping releasing this project open source helps that these changes potentially benefit people at the bottom as much as it benefits people at the top.
I took a show about Bleeding Kansas that I had a pilot and a lot of thoughts in my head for, and with a couple of weeks of work with my system I have a full bible, character models, story outlines, and spec scripts for four seasons of TV. This system can produce stories with dozens of major characters and over an undeterminably long length of content. Since the system segregates only critical information into its context when writing, to push it past it's limits would likely require massive scenes with an unrealistic number of speaking characters.
Right now, the system is a little bit of a pain to install. After you download the repo the next step is to install visual studio code (free). Within Visual Studio Code it will give you the option to open a folder, or you can also just give it the repo link: https://github.com/Open-Write/Op... and it will clone it to your drive. After that go to the extensions within VS and install Kilo Code. In Kilo Code you will need to go to settings and setup whatever LLM service you are going to use. Once your LLM is connected it should be pretty easy.
The onboarding document for any new bot is start_here.md in the skills folder so always tell the bot to read that. After it reads the document, it should be able to install the other dependencies for you if you don't have them (Node JS and Python). Then the bot can tell you whatever else you might need to know including how it works and what it can do. The nice thing about this setup is that you can easily get a kilo code bot to customize the project to fit your particular needs. If you see something new and cool being done with AI and think it could work with Open-Write, just tell your bot to read the documentation and implement the changes.
I'm looking at integrating Open-Write with the Storythread Studio's UI so that it can work as a standalone product. Hopefully I will have more to report on this soon.