Fiction lives or dies on craft. These articles cover the work of writing a story people cannot put down: character, plot, pacing, and dialogue. The skills that turn a good idea into a book a reader finishes at two in the morning.
fiction writingSeptember 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…
fiction writingSeptember 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.…
fiction writingSeptember 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…
fiction writingSeptember 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…
fiction writingSeptember 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.…
fiction writingAugust 14, 2026
Collision with Andromeda sat unfinished for eight years. Here is the story behind a novel told partly from the point of view of a galaxy, and the lonely mind at its heart.
fiction writingAugust 12, 2026
In 1981 I fell in love with a text game called Dungeon, the predecessor of Zork. Forty years later I turned it into a novel. Here is why, and the decision that saved the book.
ConsciousnessAugust 11, 2026
The Eternal War started with one question: what happens when an AI goes to Hell? Not a person with a soul, but a machine that cannot find the pattern in eternal punishment.
fiction writingAugust 10, 2026
The first Behind the Book essay: how my first novel grew from a Facebook message, fourteen hours of Skype interviews under a no-lying rule, a pen name I later retired, and an ending that refused a rescue.
fiction writingJuly 22, 2026
She was happy. He was terrified. The hotel was romantic. Every one of those is the author reaching a conclusion the reader was supposed to reach.
fiction writingJune 25, 2026
Ghostwriting suspense is engineering dread. Every scene has to tighten the screw, controlling what the reader knows and when.
fiction writingJune 16, 2026
Nostalgia is mostly a lie, but some of what we traded away after 2000 cost us something real. DVDs you actually owned, phone numbers in your head, the map of your own city, boredom that fed your imagination. A clear-eyed…
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