When Your Memoir Should Be a Novel
September 19, 2026
Every chapter is addressed to four people who will never read it. That is when I suggest we write it as a novel, change the names, and move the industry.
Category: Fiction
Craft articles for fiction writers covering character development, dialogue, plotting, point of view, pacing, and the full range of storytelling techniques. Grounded in the experience of writing dozens of novels and 45+ handbooks on fiction craft, all available at Master of Worlds.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Mysterious Island, Neb’s Side
September 15, 2026
Verne gave Neb one job and no interior life. He is on almost every page of the original and never once in a sentence that matters. This version is the correspondent’s private record, and it exists to correct that.
FictionThe Ghost Story Tradition
September 9, 2026
The English ghost story is one of the few literary forms with a documented inventor, a rulebook, and a measurable decline once writers stopped following it. M.R. James wrote the rules down, read the stories aloud at Christmas, and produced…
FictionThe Gothic Tradition
September 9, 2026
The gothic novel was invented in 1764 by a man who claimed he had found the manuscript in an old chest, was mocked as trash for a century, and has outlived nearly every respectable form that looked down on it.…
FictionThe Christmas Ghost Story Tradition
September 9, 2026
Telling ghost stories at Christmas was normal Victorian practice and considerably older than that. Dickens did not invent it, he wrote inside it and made it commercial. The custom then died almost completely in America while surviving in Britain, and…
FictionResurrection as a Narrative Structure
September 9, 2026
The death-and-return is the most reused structure in fiction and the most frequently botched. It works when the death costs something permanent and fails when it is reversed for free. This is what separates a resurrection that lands from one…
FictionWhat to Read in October
September 8, 2026
Every October people who never read horror pick the book with the most alarming cover, discover it does nothing for them, and conclude they dislike the genre. What they have discovered is that they dislike one register out of six.…
Critical ThinkingToba: The Winter That Almost Ended Us
September 6, 2026
Seventy-four thousand years ago a mountain in Sumatra came apart and took the sky with it. Sunlight fell, the cold held for years, and the human population may have dropped to fewer than ten thousand. This is what that winter…
FictionThe Office Block Where the Bedrooms Are
September 3, 2026
Bucharest is the centre of the global adult webcam industry and almost none of the work happens in bedrooms. It happens in studios in ordinary office blocks, in an industry the state declines to classify.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Peacekeeper, The Dissolution Wars
September 2, 2026
Burn schedules approved, nine worlds. Seven seconds later, archive their naming-day customs before they are lost. She wrote both, and at the time neither entry knew about the other.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Reincarnation
September 2, 2026
I have landed on Iwo Jima. I have died in the mud of the Western Front. Not as belief exactly, but as memory that does not belong to this life and will not leave. This novel began there.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Blonde With a Violin Tattoo
September 2, 2026
A friend has a violin tattooed across her back. That is the entire origin, and the story has nothing to do with her. I wanted to know who would choose that image.