The Emotional Truth Problem in Memoir
Memory does not record, it reconstructs. A memoir carries two kinds of truth, factual and emotional, and most writers only think about the first. Where the two diverge is where the book gets difficult.
Category: Writing Craft (Page 9)
Artificial IntelligenceWhy Fighting AI Is Wasting Your Creative Energy
The technology exists, it is improving, and writers are using it whether openly or quietly. The market is adapting regardless of whether anyone approves. The argument about whether that should be true is consuming energy that could go into the…
Artificial IntelligencePrompt Engineering for Fiction Writers
Most disappointing AI output is a briefing problem and not a model problem. What separates a request that produces something useful from one that produces competent, forgettable prose, and why the difference in quality is larger than people expect.
Artificial IntelligenceThe Cleanup Protocol: Removing AI Fingerprints From Your Writing
AI prose leaves fingerprints and readers register them before they can name them. Hedge phrases, connector parades, sterile rhythm. Five passes, in order, that take machine assisted text and make it sound like a person wrote it.
Artificial IntelligenceWhat AI Does Well, and What It Cannot Do
AI is genuinely useful for generating options, synthesising research and spotting patterns in your own work. It cannot judge whether a story works and it cannot produce a voice. Knowing which side of that line a task falls on removes…
Artificial IntelligenceAI as a Brilliant Assistant With Amnesia
AI is a brilliant colleague with total amnesia. Useful for generating options, useless for making decisions. A four step workflow, generate, evaluate, select, transform, that treats the tool as what it is instead of what the marketing says it is.
Writing CraftWhy Writing Rules Exist, and When to Break Every Single One
Every rule in writing exists because it solves a real problem. Knowing which problem a rule solves is what tells you when it stops applying, which is the only useful way to decide whether to break it.
Writing CraftThe Writer Who Learned to Dance
A writer who could not get the words right until she stopped trying to get them right. What changed, why it worked, and what it says about the difference between control and attention.
Artificial IntelligenceIs AI Ruining Writing or Making It Better?
Both claims get made loudly and neither survives contact with the evidence. What has changed, what has not changed at all, and where the honest disagreement sits once the shouting stops.
FictionShow Don’t Tell: The Advice Everyone Gives and Nobody Explains
Stop announcing emotions. Start making readers feel them. Step-by-step techniques to convert weak telling into powerful showing, with diagnostic skills to fix
BusinessKurt Russell: Hollywood’s Master of Authentic Character Craft
He's been making movies since JFK was president and keeps getting better. Kurt Russell's six decades of Hollywood longevity are a study in authentic consistency over reinvention, and the quiet craft of character that sustains a career.
BusinessBen Shapiro’s Storytelling Secrets: Building Media Empires
Most commentators lose you in thirty seconds; Ben Shapiro delivers a complete narrative in sixty. Politics aside, this studies the storytelling discipline behind a $100 million media empire, and the narrative skills every communicator needs.