As best I can tell, I got the urge for this fanfic from reading about the Hallmark Mahogany version of S&S from 2024. It cast Colonel Brandon, the Dashwood sisters and their mother, plus Lucy Steele, as black, and most of the rest of the characters as white. But this version was set in a Bridgerton-esque AU Regency. It occurred to me that one could do interesting things in 1810s New Orleans with a similar idea. I wouldn’t swear that this hasn’t been done before. I feel like I might have seen it floated as a hypothetical somewhere in the fandom, in the last thirty years that I’ve drifted in and out of it.

In any case, it started to coalesce around the time of the fanficcing experiment outlined in this post. I had a general idea of what I wanted the characters to be, so I took the idea to Claude Sonnet. (Might have been 3.7 at that point, not sure). Claude helped me name the characters, nail down the backgrounds of the “Yankees” in the story, suggest a place where the one interracial couple could legally marry, and narrow down the timeframe to 1813-1814. I fretted about whether the Colonel Brandon analogue would be able to duel a white man. Claude helpfully pointed out that at least there seemed to be cases of black transplants from Saint-Domingue dueling within their own community. After I verified the reference, it made that subplot seem less far-fetched. Claude also produced a very vague, thousand-foot-view outline of thirty-ish scenes. I stashed these for the time being, and turned away to other projects.

Around the time I got access to Claude CoWork, I watched a video about the so-called GOA (Goal, Obstacle, Action) framework for writing scenes. I got Claude Sonnet 4.6 (In a rare instance of it ACTUALLY working in CoWork) to rework the outline in more detail using this framework. It still came off as more a series of vignettes than a tight plot. But, honestly, the source novel has that issue to some extent, and more importantly I didn’t feel like putting in the work to fix the outline. And then the plot bunny sat for a while longer, aside from some attempts to get Claude, any Claude, to write it in CoWork.

I finally fell back on using the chatbot version inside a project. The project’s special instructions for drafting were to observe certain stylistic parameters, and use the full version of the GOA framework. This calls for a minimum of three actions and three setting details called “anchors” to flesh out the scene. I guess it should be called the GOAAAAAA or GO3A3A framework. As reference documents for the project, I added the character list and enhanced outline. Then I started a chat inside the project and asked Claude to review the information given to it. It recognized a continuity issue from the outline that I’d forgotten about, so I told it how I wanted that fixed, and asked for a redrafted outline of those scenes. After adding that to the projects reference documents, we were ready to begin. I’ve documented the individual scene hiccups in the notes at the start of each scene. Like the fact that in its first draft of the first scene, Claude completely elided the heroines’ ethnicity and the fact that their father was not legally married to their mother.

My main observations are that I could have done a better job offering it stylistic guidance, and that the scene by scene guide is very helpful in telling it what to do next. But I’m enjoying watching the story unfold, and I hope you are too.