Fiction WritingShow, don't tell gets repeated like scripture and understood like almost nothing. Said as though it is self-explanatory, it leaves writers knowing they should show but unsure how. Here is what showing actually means on the page, what telling looks…
Fiction WritingI'm stressed about tomorrow. Did you know Mongolia has under three million people? That sideways reply is a non sequitur, and what reads as awkward in real life becomes a precision tool in fiction. A character who dodges the obvious…
Fiction WritingDead parents, abusive childhoods, betrayed trusts, writers stack trauma into character bibles like medals at a suffering Olympics. The problem is not that the past matters; it is treating it as decoration instead of the engine driving how a character…
Fiction WritingAn allegory dies the instant a reader catches it being an allegory, the moment they think this stands for that and switch from reading to decoding. Then the story becomes a lecture with a plot. The fix is a surface…
Fiction WritingDozens of novels sounds impossible until you see the machinery underneath: no decision fatigue, no disorganized research, no characters left half-built, no waiting on inspiration. A novel is not a mystery; it is a series of concrete problems that respond…
Fiction WritingMystery is the biggest commercial fiction category after romance, with thriller it claims about 35 percent of adult fiction sales. These readers move fast and spend real money, and they can feel a cheat. Most advice treats the genre as…
Fiction WritingChoosing a point of view feels easy until you are 150 pages in and realize you have been head-hopping, or describing things your narrator could never see. POV consistency breaks at novel length precisely because it looks trivial. Here is…
Fiction WritingRomance is the single largest category in commercial fiction, bigger than mystery and thriller combined, and it rewards writers who understand what readers actually want instead of what writers assume they want. Most advice misses that entirely. Here is what…
Fiction WritingI have spent forty-five years writing one fantasy series, Peacekeeper, longer than I have done almost anything else. It taught me more about world-building and magic systems than any craft book could. Here is what nearly half a century inside…
Fiction WritingThe most important rule of killing a character is that the death has to be earned, and it is the rule writers break most often. Pile on the emotional score all you want; an unearned death still reads as cheap.…
Fiction WritingThe briefcase everyone wants, the formula they would kill for, the MacGuffin drives the plot while barely mattering itself. The characters care intensely; the audience never has to. What matters is the chase and the choices it forces. Hitchcock named…
Fiction WritingEvery other genre borrows the real world; fantasy builds its world from nothing, which means you are always doing two jobs at once, telling the story and constructing the place it happens. Most fantasy novels die where those jobs collide.…
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