The 5-Line Prompt Skeleton I Reuse for Every Reel Script

I run the same five-line prompt for every reel script. Same five lines. They've been the same five lines for about three months now. The only thing that changes is the topic.

That's the whole "system." No secret prompt library. No twenty-line megaprompt. Same skeleton every time, with one variable swapped.

The skeleton

Five lines, in order:

PERSONA: who's writing this. Three sentences max. Name, role, vibe, what they care about.
VOICE: how they talk. List five real phrases the persona says, plus three things they'd never say.
FORMAT: what kind of output. "9:16 reel script. 7–15 seconds. Five-act: hook, discovery, emotion, justification, close."
TOPIC: the one thing that changes per script. One sentence. A real moment, not a category.
CONSTRAINT: what NOT to do. Banned words, banned tones, banned wrap-ups.

Why it works

The model needs four things to write something usable, and one thing that changes. PERSONA / VOICE / FORMAT / CONSTRAINT are the four. TOPIC is the variable. Give it all five, every time, in the same order, and the output stays in your voice. Skip one and drift creeps in.

I used to write fresh prompts for every script. I'd start over. I'd add context. I'd explain things I'd already explained yesterday. Every script took fifteen minutes of setup and produced something that sounded like a different person every time.

The skeleton fixed that. Now I open the chat, paste the same five lines, change the TOPIC, hit send. The script comes back in my voice because the model never has to guess what my voice is.

The trick is admitting it's enough

The hardest part of using a five-line skeleton is believing it's enough. Most prompt advice tells you to write longer, more detailed prompts — chain-of-thought, stacked examples, roleplay. None of that is wrong. Most of it is for one-off prompts.

Reusable prompts run on different rules. They have to be short enough that you actually reuse them. If it takes five minutes to fill out, you'll write ad-hoc prompts instead. The five-line skeleton is short enough that the friction is zero. Which is why it gets used. Which is why the output is consistent.

It took me a while to admit I didn't need a smarter prompt. I needed the same prompt, run more often.

— Jeff