chekhov-dramaturgy

screenwriting-skills

中文版 · 日本語 · 한국어 · Français

26 agent skills (for Claude Code and OpenAI Codex) for screenwriting, television writing and dramaturgy, distilled from 47 craft books and 23 volumes of published scripts, scores and plays (Chinese, American, British, Japanese and Korean).

The skill files follow the open agentskills.io standard and are shared by both agents: install once and it works in both.

Ask in your own language. The skill bodies are written in Chinese, because most of the sources are Chinese originals or Chinese translations. That is only where the text lives: ask in English, Japanese, Korean or French and you get the answer in that language. See Multilingual support for why there is a single source tree.

Install

Claude Code

Plugin marketplace (recommended)

/plugin marketplace add jtydhr88/screenwriting-skills
/plugin install screenwriting@screenwriting-skills

Skills are then invoked as /screenwriting:<skill>, e.g. /screenwriting:sw-dialogue.

Personal (all projects)

git clone https://github.com/jtydhr88/screenwriting-skills.git
cp -r screenwriting-skills/plugins/screenwriting/skills/* ~/.claude/skills/

Project-specific

mkdir -p .claude/skills
cp -r screenwriting-skills/plugins/screenwriting/skills/* .claude/skills/

Verify

Skills load automatically when the agent detects relevant context. To list them: /skills.

Codex (CLI / ChatGPT desktop app / IDE extension)

Plugin marketplace (recommended)

codex plugin marketplace add jtydhr88/screenwriting-skills

# Then, in the ChatGPT desktop app or Codex CLI:
# Plugins → select "Screenwriting Skills" → Install

The same 26 skill files are shipped through the plugin, with no duplication and no rewriting.

Personal skills (all projects)

git clone https://github.com/jtydhr88/screenwriting-skills.git
cp -r screenwriting-skills/plugins/screenwriting/skills/* ~/.agents/skills/

Project-specific

mkdir -p .agents/skills
cp -r screenwriting-skills/plugins/screenwriting/skills/* .agents/skills/

Verify

Run /skills to list available skills, or invoke one explicitly with $sw-story-structure.

Usage examples

# "Break my 12-episode series into acts and place the act outs"
# → agent uses sw-series-structure

# "My dialogue is all on the nose, fix this scene"
# → agent uses sw-dialogue + sw-scene-craft

# "Turn this 400,000-word novel into a 40-episode Chinese drama outline"
# → agent uses sw-chinese-series-practice + sw-series-engine-bible

# "Set up a project and keep track of where I am"
# → agent uses sw-workflow

Multilingual support

One source tree, every language at runtime. The skills are written once, in Chinese, and the agent delivers in whatever language you asked in.

This is a deliberate decision, and it was not the first one. There was an English edition once, a parallel screenwriting-en plugin with all 20 skills translated. It was proposed in #3, built, and merged. It has since been removed. The argument that killed it is the one that applies equally to every other language: if a reader who cannot read Chinese deserves a translated tree, so does a reader who cannot read English, and the next request is Japanese, then Korean, then French, then Russian. Five languages is 230 files that drift independently, with nothing to tell you which one is stale. The translation itself is cheap. The real cost is that forking once removes any principled ground for refusing the second fork.

So the line is drawn at the source, and the runtime does the rest:

• Output language follows your question. Ask in French, get French. No flag, no separate install.
• Terminology is anchored to the original term. The craft vocabulary of this field is originally English: logline, act out, beat sheet, showrunner, staff writer. The Chinese in the source books (计程绳, 出幕, 节拍表, 剧目管理人, 试用编剧) is the translation, and different translators chose differently. The term table in sw-workflow maps each concept back to its original term, so the agent restores the word. The same table serves all languages at once, because a Japanese or French screenwriter also says act out and logline.
• Terms with no equivalent keep their original form plus a gloss. 戏眼, 扣子, ト書き and 決定稿 come through as 戏眼 (xìyǎn — the one-line core attraction of an episode).
• Your script stays in your script's language. Discussing a Chinese screenplay in English is normal; the conversation switches language, the draft does not.

What this trades away is auditability: you cannot read the instruction file itself unless you read Chinese, only the agent's account of it. That is a real cost, and it is the one thing the deleted English edition genuinely bought. It was not worth a permanent five-way maintenance burden.

READMEs are a different matter and are translated, because they are short, stable, and the thing a newcomer meets first. The Japanese, Korean and French READMEs deliberately stop at install, structure and this policy; the full skill tables and the source bibliography live here and in the Chinese README, for exactly the reason above.

How the skills are organised

Four layers. A feature project uses layers 1, 3 and 4; a series or stage project adds layer 2, because the medium layer replaces structure-for-film with the medium's own units.

1. General dramaturgy   premise · structure · character · dialogue · scene · format · Truby organic anatomy · genre anatomy · project workflow
2. Medium layer         series · episode & season structure · engine & bible · writers' room · half-hour comedy
                        stage  · Chinese opera: banqiang and qupai methods, each with a full-script case library
3. Tradition & trade    America · Japan · Korea & France · mainland China · the business
4. Master corpora       Chekhov · Ozu · Succession · television case studies

1. General dramaturgy (medium-independent)