Tutorial · The Novelist

The Novelist

You don't start with a graph — you start with prose. TropeLang is built for that: write the scene in plain words, then add structure only where it earns its keep, and let recognition tell you what the draft is actually doing.

1 · Start in prose

A triple-quoted block holds raw prose. On its own it's inert — it parses and round-trips, it just doesn't say anything to the engine yet. An all-prose file is a perfectly valid starting point.

"""
The steward had served the old king for thirty years. No one
in the court trusted anyone more. On the night of the feast,
he opened the gate to the king's enemies.
"""

2 · Name the cast

Pull the people out of the paragraph and tag what they are. Wire the one relationship the scene turns on. Already the draft has bones a machine can read.

char steward [+Ally]
char king [+Protagonist] [+Ruler]
steward -- king : "thirty years of service"

3 · Structure the turn

The scene pivots on a single act. Make it a beat: an evt with a verb. You never label the trope — the engine reads the shape (trust, then a breach by the same hand) and surfaces it.

char steward [+Ally]
char king [+Protagonist]
scene the_feast {
  beat 1 { steward -- king : "trusted above all" }
  beat 2 { evt the_gate [&Betrays(agent=steward, target=king)] }
}

4 · What's true vs. what's believed

Prose carries dramatic irony in its tone; TropeLang carries it in markers. The steward is a traitor (!…!); the king believes him trustworthy (*…*). Now the gap between them is a fact you can query, not just a mood. (See epistemic levels.)

char steward [+Ally]
char king [+Protagonist]
scene the_feast {
  beat 1 {
    !steward [+Traitor]!        // what's true
    *steward [+Trustworthy]*    // what the king believes
  }
}

5 · Prose and structure, side by side

You don't have to choose. Keep the line you like as prose and structure only the beat that matters — recognition still lights up from the structured part, while the rest stays in your own voice.

char steward [+Ally]
char king [+Protagonist] [+Ruler]
scene the_feast {
  beat 1 {
    """ The steward smiles and pours the king's wine. """
    steward -- king : "trusted above all"
  }
  beat 2 { evt the_gate [&Betrays(agent=steward, target=king)] }
  beat 3 { king [#Betrayed] }
}

The loop

That's the whole practice: write prose → structure a beat → read what recognizes → repeat, structuring one paragraph at a time. The draft stays readable the whole way, and the structure makes it queryable. When you want the ideas underneath, start with literate authoring.