The craft decisions that change the work rather than decorate it. When to break a rule, why resolutions collapse in February, what editing is really for, and what a long writing life looks like from inside it.
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…
NonfictionA chapter is as long as one complete thought, and a thousand words is plenty when the thought is finished. Keep with next and real heading styles stop a manuscript from fighting you through every revision.
AI WritingEverything after the last chapter serves a reader who already bought your book, and the back cover sells it to one who hasn't. I cover indexes, author bios, acknowledgments and back cover copy, and what I recommend for each one.
Book MarketingA preface tells readers why you wrote the book, and most of them skip it. The introduction is the two to four page sales tool that decides whether they buy. This piece covers what each opening page is for, where…
DialogueReaders skim right past dialogue tags, so use the plain ones and don't bury anything important in them. My simple rules for said, tag variety, adverbs and action beats.
Fiction WritingVerne gave Neb one job and no interior life. He is on almost every page of the original and never once in a sentence that matters. This version is the correspondent’s private record, and it exists to correct that.
FictionThe 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…
FictionThe 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.…
ChristmasTelling 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 WritingThere are four books that get given to writers, and anyone who has been writing for more than a year owns all four. This is a guide to what to give instead, organized by what the person is struggling with…
FictionThe 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 WritingCalling a book a beach read is usually a way of praising it while making clear you are not taking it seriously. The assumption underneath is that easy reading means easy writing, and that assumption is exactly backwards.
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