Pipeline Instruction
A hard rule attached to a Ghost Character that prevents the generation pipeline from resurrecting them as an active presence in the story.
What is a Pipeline Instruction?
When you define a Ghost Character in a novel — a figure who is dead, absent, and exists only through evidence — you are making a craft commitment: this character will never appear on the page. They will be felt, not seen. They will be reconstructed from fragments, not encountered directly.
A Pipeline Instruction is the technical enforcement of that commitment. It is a hard rule, written in plain language, that tells the generation pipeline exactly what this character must never do.
Why Pipeline Instructions are necessary
A generation pipeline, without explicit constraints, will default to what makes narrative sense in the immediate moment of each chapter. If a Ghost Character has been established as significant — if their absence has been felt throughout the story — a pipeline may generate a scene in which they appear: as a vision, a presence, a voice from another room, a figure glimpsed at the edge of the protagonist's perception.
This is almost always wrong. The power of a Ghost Character comes from their absolute absence. The moment they appear — in any form — they become a living character again, and everything that was powerful about their ghostliness collapses.
A Pipeline Instruction prevents this by making the constraint explicit, binding, and non-negotiable.
What a Pipeline Instruction contains
A Pipeline Instruction names what the Ghost Character must never do, in plain declarative language:
"Must never appear as a presence, vision, or voice. May only exist through handwritten records, physical objects, and other characters' spoken memories of them."
"Must not be perceived — seen, heard, felt, or sensed in any form. Their existence in any scene is limited to artifacts: the recipe box, the letters, the photograph with the corner torn off."
"May never speak, appear, or be experienced as present. Any reference to this character must be through third-party account, documentary evidence, or physical trace."
The instruction should be as specific as the Ghost Character requires. A figure with a strong supernatural resonance may need a more explicit instruction than one whose absence is simply a matter of chronology.
Pipeline Instructions and Forbidden Rules
Pipeline Instructions for Ghost Characters work similarly to Forbidden Rules on the Shape tab — both are hard constraints on generation behavior, both are negative in form ("must never"), and both exist because without explicit constraints, a generation pipeline will default to the most dramatically available option.
The difference is scope: Forbidden Rules apply to the entire story. Pipeline Instructions apply to a specific Ghost Character. They can coexist and reinforce each other: a Forbidden Rule might say "never introduce supernatural elements" while the Pipeline Instruction for a Ghost Character says "must never appear as a presence, vision, or voice" — the second is a specific application of the first.
How Bespoke Books uses it
In the Bespoke Books Composer, Pipeline Instruction is a required field for every Ghost Character defined in the Characters tab. The generation pipeline treats it as a binding constraint: any chapter beat or prose generation that would violate the Pipeline Instruction is invalid. It is the contract that keeps a Ghost Character a ghost across the full length of the novel.
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