The StoryLeaf Guide

The Story Inside Everyone

There is a persistent myth that storytelling is a rare gift — something possessed by novelists, screenwriters, and bards. The truth is almost the opposite. Every person, at every age, is a natural story machine. Children prove it effortlessly: give a child twenty minutes, a forest, and an imaginary friend, and they will produce narrative complexity that would humble most professional writers.

What stops adults is not imagination. It is infrastructure. Writing a story from scratch requires sustained time, technical skill, and the willingness to sit with a blank page until something appears. Most of us never find the right conditions. The story stays locked inside.

StoryLeaf was built on one central conviction: the infrastructure problem is now solvable. Generative AI can serve as the creative collaborator that used to require a writing partner, a professional illustrator, and years of practice. What you bring is the thing AI cannot manufacture — your curiosity, your choices, your voice.

This guide is a map. It covers how StoryLeaf works from the inside — the story loop, the worlds you can inhabit, the image styles available to you, the advanced tools that unlock once you know the basics, and the subtle craft of steering AI toward stories that feel alive. Read it front to back once, then return to any section as a reference.

How It Works: The Story Loop

At the heart of StoryLeaf is a loop so simple you can explain it in one breath: you write something, the AI continues the story, an illustration appears, and you decide what happens next. Repeat until the tale is told — or until you want to branch it in a new direction entirely.

But the simplicity conceals real sophistication. Let's examine each stage.

Your Move

You are not writing to StoryLeaf — you are writing inside the world it has set up. When a new story begins, the AI describes your surroundings, introduces a situation, and leaves you room to act. You respond naturally, as you would in a conversation: "I ask the innkeeper what she knows about the forest." or "I ignore the strange sound and keep walking." or simply "I want to find the ship."

The AI's Response

StoryLeaf runs on Claude — Anthropic's most capable reasoning model. Before generating its response, the AI thinks about your input: it considers the world's internal logic, the story so far, your character's relationships, and the narrative direction you seem to be steering toward. This thinking is hidden by default, but you can toggle it on with the /analysis command to see the reasoning behind each scene.

The response arrives as an immersive continuation — typically one vivid paragraph establishing situation, atmosphere, and new information — followed by an implicit or explicit invitation for your next move. NPCs speak. Weather changes. Consequences arrive. The world behaves consistently because the AI maintains an internal model of everything that has happened.

The Illustration

Every scene generates an illustration. The AI extracts the visual essence of the moment — not a literal transcription, but an interpretive image that captures mood, character, and setting. These are rendered at 1024×1024 pixels using state-of-the-art image generation models, then stored in your story's gallery.

Image generation runs in parallel with text generation — you rarely wait more than a few seconds. A 400×400 thumbnail appears in your story index automatically, so your story is always visually browsable.

The Memory

StoryLeaf maintains a full transcript of your story — up to 999 messages — before automatically summarizing older context. This means characters you met in chapter one remember you in chapter ten. Choices you made early have consequences later. The world is not reset between sessions.

Your Worlds

StoryLeaf is not one game — it is a collection of distinct universes, each with its own lore, tone, and possibility space. When you create a new story, you choose which world to inhabit. This choice shapes everything: the language the AI uses, the types of characters you encounter, the historical and physical rules of the setting.

Choosing the Right World

New users almost always find Coastal Realms to be the smoothest entry point. The fantasy setting is familiar, the AI's world-knowledge is deep, and the flexibility allows any kind of story from children's adventure to adult political intrigue. Neo-Metropolis suits people who already have a character archetype in mind — it rewards specificity. Animal Gods is the most visually distinctive choice, particularly if you intend to use Watercolor or Illustrated styles. Custom World is best saved until you have a clear sense of what StoryLeaf can do, so you know what to ask for.

The Art of Illustration

Every world looks different depending on the illustrator you choose. Illustration styles are applied at story creation and shape the visual language of every image generated in that story. Changing style mid-story is possible through image restyling (covered in Advanced Features), but starting with the right style prevents the need.

How Illustrations Are Generated

The AI maintains a dedicated Imaginary Illustrator — a layer that watches the story and, at each turn, translates the narrative moment into a visual description. This is not a screenshot of the text; it is an interpretation. The Illustrator is opinionated: it selects what is most visually resonant, adds symbolic elements, and sometimes surprises you with a perspective you didn't expect.

This is by design. The best illustrated stories in history — from Beatrix Potter to Hayao Miyazaki's film boards — always contained something the author didn't write explicitly. The illustrator is a creative collaborator, not a transcription service. StoryLeaf's Imaginary Illustrator works the same way.

Where You Can Play

StoryLeaf is available on two platforms. Both access the same stories, the same AI, and the same image generation pipeline. The choice between them is purely about workflow preference.

Stories created on either platform are accessible on the other. If you start a story in Telegram, you can load it in the Web Studio to edit images, export, or publish. The platforms complement each other rather than competing.

Advanced Features

Once you have the story loop in your hands, several more powerful capabilities open up. These are not beginner features — they reward familiarity with how the system behaves.

Story Forking

Forking is particularly powerful for stories you love but want to explore differently — a story where you said yes could become a story where you said no. Published stories on the Stories page can also be forked by anyone, creating a collaborative creative ecosystem. Your story becomes source material for other imaginations.

Voice Narration

Voice narration is particularly useful for children who prefer listening to reading, for accessibility, and for reviewing stories on the move. When voice is active, each frame arrives with an audio track automatically.

Export Formats

When a story is ready to leave the platform, three export paths are available:

1. 1
   EPUB (.epub) A standard ebook format readable on Kindle, Apple Books, and most e-readers. Your story becomes a proper illustrated book — frames as chapters, images embedded, title and author metadata included.
2. 2
   Slideshow (.mp4) A video where each illustrated frame appears in sequence with text overlaid. Generated using FFmpeg; suitable for sharing on social media, presenting to an audience, or archiving a story in a format anyone can watch.
3. 3
   Audiobook (.mp3) The story narrated in full, frame by frame, with the "onyx" voice. The output is a single audio file: your story as a podcast episode, a bedtime recording, or a commute companion.

Image Restyling

Multi-language Support

Thinking Mode

AI Model Selection

StoryLeaf defaults to Claude Sonnet — the ideal balance of creativity, speed, and cost. Power users who want deeper world-building, more complex NPC behavior, and richer prose can switch to Claude Opus via the /model command. Opus takes slightly longer per frame and uses more credits, but the quality difference is perceptible in long, complex narratives.

Crafting Better Stories

StoryLeaf rewards a particular relationship with the AI: not commanding it, but collaborating with it. These are the patterns that consistently produce the most vivid, surprising, and satisfying stories.

Use specificity like a brush

Generic inputs produce generic responses. The more specific your actions, the richer the AI's response. Compare "I look around" to "I look for anything that could be used as a boat oar." The first invites a scene description. The second opens a puzzle, a character interaction, an object with history. Specificity is the primary lever you have on story quality.

Let your quirks become the story's DNA

StoryLeaf doesn't just tolerate your idiosyncrasies — it amplifies them. If you mention in passing that you always greet people with a formal bow, the AI will weave that into character reactions. If you start writing haikus to describe your surroundings, the AI will begin generating haikus for your character on every turn. Your personality, imported consistently, becomes the story's distinctive texture.

Don't explain — act

First-person actions produce stronger results than third-person explanations. "I want the story to go toward the mountain" is weaker than "I start walking toward the mountain." The AI interprets actions as story beats; explanations as instructions. Trust the system — it will follow your lead without needing a roadmap.

Use /undo as an editing tool

The /undo command removes the last frame from your story. This is not cheating — it is editing. If a scene went in a direction that doesn't serve the story, undo it and try a different approach. Professional writers revise. You should too.

Shape the visual story intentionally

The AI generates image prompts from narrative content, but you can influence what gets depicted by describing visual details in your inputs. Mentioning colors, lighting, specific objects, and character appearances increases the chance they appear in illustrations. You are not writing image prompts — you are writing story beats that contain visual cues. The difference matters: the AI will always prioritize narrative coherence over your visual preferences, but strong narrative detail and strong visual detail often coincide.

Work with the 50-word rhythm

The AI is calibrated for short, punchy exchanges. If responses feel too brief for the depth you want, try asking the AI explicitly to elaborate on a specific element: "Tell me more about what the innkeeper looks like." or "Describe the sounds coming from the forest." These prompts work better than asking for "a longer response" — they give the AI something concrete to expand on within its natural rhythm.

Getting Started

If you have read this far, you are ready. The system is simple enough to start in thirty seconds; deep enough to reward months of exploration. Here is the path of least resistance to your first story.

1. 1
   Choose your platform Go to Story Studio in your browser, or open Telegram and find @StoryLeaf_Bot. Both require no installation. Web Studio uses magic link login — enter your email, click the link, you are in.
2. 2
   Create a new story Select New Story. You will be asked for a world (start with Coastal Realms), a style (start with Standard or Illustrated), and a language. That is all the setup required. The AI takes it from there.
3. 3
   Begin with curiosity The AI will set a scene. Read it, pick one thing that interests you, and react to it. Ask a question. Touch something. Move toward the horizon. Your first move does not need to be clever — it needs to be yours. The story will grow from there.

Command Reference

These commands work in the Telegram Bot. Most also have equivalents in the Web Studio interface.