What Are Writing Styles?

The Big Idea

Writing Styles are the single biggest lever you have over how the AI writes. They control vocabulary, sentence rhythm, prose density, tone, pacing, and the overall feel of every word the AI generates. Think of a style as a voice profile — it tells the AI how to write, while your instructions tell it what to write.

Without a style, the AI produces generic, middle-of-the-road prose. With the right style, it can sound like a hardboiled noir detective, a lyrical literary voice, or a breathless thriller narrator. Styles are what make AI-generated text sound like your story instead of everyone else's.

Select a style from the toolbar before you generate — it shapes everything the AI writes

What Styles Control

When a style is active, it influences every AI generation feature in Genesis Writer:

• Vocabulary — word choice, register (formal vs. casual), and domain-specific language.
• Sentence rhythm — short punchy sentences, flowing compound structures, or a natural mix.
• Prose density — how much descriptive detail the AI packs into each paragraph.
• Tone — dark and brooding, warm and hopeful, dry and witty, or anything in between.
• Pacing — how quickly scenes unfold, how much interiority the AI gives characters.
• Figurative language — frequency and type of metaphors, similes, and imagery.

The Three Built-in Defaults

Every Genesis Writer account comes with three built-in styles. These are always available regardless of your plan, and they cover the most common writing modes.

Balanced

Temperature: 0.65 — The default style. Balanced produces clean, invisible prose with sensory grounding. It doesn't call attention to itself — the writing serves the story without getting in the way. This is your best bet for first drafts when you want solid, workable prose you can refine later.

Balanced hits the sweet spot between creativity and predictability. Sentences flow naturally, descriptions are vivid but not overwrought, and dialogue feels grounded. If you're not sure which style to use, start here.

Creative

Temperature: 0.85 — Creative pushes the AI toward figurative language, unexpected angles, and richer texture. You'll get more metaphors, more sensory detail, and prose that takes more risks. It's ideal when you want creative fuel — raw material that surprises you and sparks new directions.

The higher temperature means more variation between generations. Run the same prompt twice with Creative and you'll get noticeably different results. That's a feature, not a bug — it's what makes it useful for exploration.

Precise

Temperature: 0.45 — Precise is built for economy. It follows your instructions closely, minimizes deviation, and produces tight, controlled prose. Use it when you're editing, when you need the AI to hit a specific beat, or when you want minimal creative interpretation.

Precise is especially useful with Rewrite and Polish — situations where you already know what you want and just need the AI to execute it faithfully.

Community & Preset Styles

Beyond the three defaults, Genesis Writer offers 30+ curated preset styles on the marketplace, covering every major genre: Romance, Fantasy, Thriller, Literary, Sci-Fi, Horror, Mystery, and more. Each preset is hand-crafted by the Genesis Writer team or contributed by community members and reviewed for quality.

Preset styles go far deeper than the built-in defaults. They include genre-specific vocabulary, pacing patterns, and prose textures tuned for particular types of stories. A noir thriller style writes differently from an epic fantasy style — and both write differently from a literary fiction style.

Browse and apply presets from the Style Marketplace or directly from the Style Selector in your writer toolbar. See Using Preset Styles for a full walkthrough.

Custom Styles

If the presets don't capture your voice, you can build your own. Custom styles let you define a multi-stage prompt pipeline that shapes every aspect of the AI's output. You control the system prompts, temperature, token limits, and template variables at each stage.

Custom style creation requires a Writer plan or above. The creation wizard walks you through five steps: Intent, Basics, Prompts, Illustration, and Publish. You can also share your custom styles on the marketplace for other writers to discover.

Learn how in Creating Custom Styles.

How Styles Work Under the Hood

Styles use a multi-stage prompt pipeline. When you generate text with a style active, your content doesn't go through a single prompt — it passes through one or more pipeline stages, each with its own system prompt, user prompt, and model settings.

The output from Stage 1 feeds into Stage 2 as context, and so on. This lets styles do sophisticated things like first analyzing your text for tone, then generating prose that matches that tone, then polishing the result for rhythm. Most users never need to think about the pipeline — the presets and defaults handle it for you.

Power users who want to understand (or build) pipelines can read Style Pipeline & Templates.

Selecting a Style

To apply a style, open the Style Selector in the writer toolbar (it's the button that shows your current style name). From there you can:

1. Browse your library of saved styles.
2. Search by name or category.
3. Click a style to activate it.

Your selected style stays active for the session until you change it. All subsequent generations — Write, Continue, Rewrite, Expand, plugins — will use that style.

Click any style to apply it — your selection persists until you change it

Where Styles Apply

Styles affect every AI generation feature in Genesis Writer:

Ready to start using styles? Head to Using Preset Styles to browse and apply your first style, or jump to Creating Custom Styles if you want to build your own.