Structure is the invisible architecture that keeps readers turning pages. These posts cover the Hero’s Journey, three-act shape, pacing, foreshadowing, conflict, and why a “deus ex machina” ending breaks the contract with your reader.
Children's BooksTell a Fairy Tale Day falls on February 26. The tales we know were collected, rewritten and softened by editors for three hundred years, and the changes tell you as much about storytelling as the stories do.
Children's BooksHarry Potter and J.K. Rowling share a July 31 birthday. The first book was turned down by publisher after publisher, launched with 500 hardbacks, and went on to sell more than 600 million copies. The story behind it is a…
1980sOctober 21 is Back to the Future Day, the date Marty McFly lands in 2015 in Part II. The occasion is a fan joke about hoverboards. The film behind it is a screenplay built so tight that almost every line…
CreativityToo many beds. Lovers to enemies. A curse only your enemy's kiss can break. Reverse tropes flip one part of a familiar story pattern, and they run on six repeatable moves you can use on any trope, including the one…
AI WritingMost plot holes in a novel are character holes: someone does something only because the author needed them to. Here's how I check finished drafts, using the methods from my Plot Handbook with AI as the checker, not the writer.
Character DevelopmentPlot armor is the invisible rig that keeps a protagonist alive, lucky and competent because the story needs them. Here are the four kinds readers spot, from wounds that don't count to choices that never cost anything, and how to…
Character DevelopmentNovelists joke that their characters took over the plot, and the joke is accurate. A character who rejects a planned scene is telling you the outline was written before you knew her.
Fiction WritingA good plot twist is a surprise the reader could have seen coming and didn't. How to plant small hints, misdirect, avoid the twists that fail, and test yours with beta readers.
ConsciousnessBloomsday is the only holiday in the world built around a novel most of its celebrants have not finished. That is worth examining instead of mocking, because the reason people give up is a structural choice Joyce made deliberately, and…
Book ReviewsUrsula K. Le Guin's Steering the Craft is a short book that does one thing well: it teaches you how to build sentences that work. It's structured as a series of workshops, each one isolating a single problem, sound, punctuation,…
Book ReviewsA reference for writers on how fear shows up in a character: the physical signals, the behavior, the internal experience, and the ways people hide it. Useful when a scene needs a reaction that is not the obvious one.
FebruaryThe forecast is worthless and the tradition is a century old. Then a film came out and the phrase stopped meaning the custom entirely, which almost never happens.
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