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…
Character DevelopmentReal people run on spite, envy and grudges as much as noble causes. The big goal drives the plot, the petty one shows who the character is. Here's why petty motivations make characters believable, and how to give your characters…
Fiction WritingGenre fiction outsells literary fiction because it delivers what readers came for. Calling it poorly written usually confuses taste with skill, and many literary classics are genre books in disguise.
Character DevelopmentJokes don't count. The most insulting line ever written seriously for the screen is She-Hulk telling Bruce Banner that catcalling and mansplaining make her better at controlling anger. Here's why it fails, and the lines that come close.
ResearchAbout 47,000 objects are tracked in Earth orbit, and models put the untracked debris in the hundreds of millions. Kessler syndrome is the chain reaction that could make some orbits unusable, and a war would set it off. It's the…
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.
EducationPeople say the books we were forced to read in high school were masterpieces we were too young to appreciate. Most of mine were crap, and getting older didn't change that. The few that worked had a story that moved.
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.
AI vs Human GhostwritingThe favorite argument against AI writing is that it has no soul. A one-prompt book has none, but plenty of human writing doesn't either. The soul in writing is the little human parts the author puts on the page.
AI vs Human GhostwritingAsking whether AI has a soul misses the point, because art itself has no soul. The soul lives in the mind that made the work and the mind receiving it, and Game of Thrones showed how fast an audience feels…
Book MarketingBefore I write chapter one of any book, I build a reader avatar: one specific person the whole book is written to. A book or its PR aimed at everybody works for nobody, so I build the avatar first and…
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