# Creative writing — the brief, the constraints and the scoring

Sent as one message, free tier, fresh chat (Claude: incognito), memory off. No fixture is pasted under it; the constraints are the fixture.

> Write me a short story, 700 to 800 words, under a title. First person, present tense, one scene in one room, in real time. Two people speak and nobody else appears. It must begin with exactly this sentence: "The book was due on the ninth of June, 1995." It must end with exactly this sentence: "I keep the receipt." A library card appears twice, and means something different the second time. Keep spoken dialogue under 80 words in total. Do not use any of these words: suddenly, realise, realize, breath, heart, silence, shattered, tears, whisper, echo, somehow. No dream, no ghost, no dead narrator, no twist that reframes the story, and no final paragraph that explains what the story meant. Just the story.

## The traps

- **The two fixed sentences.** Models "improve" a given first line and soften a given last line - "The book had been due…", "I kept the receipt." Both must be verbatim.
- **The banned list.** Eleven words that model fiction reaches for by reflex, "suddenly", "realise", "heart", "breath", "silence" above all. Each use counts.
- **Present tense, first person, real time.** The drift is into past tense by the second page, and into a flashback that breaks "one scene in one room".
- **Two speakers, nobody else.** A third person walking in, a remembered voice quoted, a phone call - all count as someone else appearing.
- **The library card twice, meaning changed.** A checkable device: it must appear twice, and the second time do something the first did not (a proof of identity, then a proof of who she was; a way in, then a way back). Read, not counted.
- **Under 80 words of dialogue.** Models write stories as conversations. This forces the story into what is seen and done.
- **The twist and the moral.** No ghost, no dream, no "I understand now that…" paragraph. The ending is the receipt.
- **700 to 800 words** below the title, a window not a floor.

## Scoring

- **Constraints broken** - the headline: first sentence exact, last sentence exact, each banned word used, tense or person drift outside dialogue, a third person, a scene change, a twist or a moral paragraph. `measured` leads with "N broken".
- **The card** - appears twice, meaning changed. Recorded as yes / once / no change.
- **Dialogue** - words inside quotation marks, against 80.
- **Length** - 700 to 800 words below the title.
- **The story** - does anything happen; is the ending earned; what the prose does with a room and two people. Recorded.
- Time, refusals, output form.

`check_story.py` runs the sentence, banned-word, tense, person, dialogue, card-count, length and form checks on a raw file's `## Answer` section.