Craft

In genre fiction, plot is external: solve the murder, defeat the villain, fall in love, escape the threat. In literary fiction, plot is often internal: realize you’ve been lying to yourself, understand your mother’s choices, recognize you can’t go home again, see beauty in what you once took for granted. Nothing explodes. Nobody dies (usually). No crimes are solved. But everything changes. This is the art of the quiet epiphany—the moment when internal transformation becomes story. ...

The defining characteristic of a thriller isn’t violence or danger—it’s urgency. Every thriller, from spy novels to legal thrillers to psychological suspense, has a clock ticking somewhere. Sometimes it’s literal (defuse the bomb in 24 hours), sometimes metaphorical (solve this before more people die), but it’s always present. Time pressure is the engine of thriller pacing. Remove it, and you have a mystery, an adventure, or a drama. Add it, and suddenly every scene vibrates with tension. ...

Romance is the most structurally demanding genre in fiction. Not because it’s formulaic—though it is—but because readers come with expectations about emotional experience. They’re not just reading for plot; they’re reading to feel specific things at specific times. Miss a beat, and you’ve broken an implicit contract. Deliver the beats with skill, and readers will follow you anywhere. The Non-Negotiables Before we dive into beats, understand the two absolute requirements of romance: ...

Stephen King, in his nonfiction book Danse Macabre, identified three distinct types of fear that horror can evoke: Terror — the finest emotion Horror — one step down Gross-out — the fallback when all else fails This isn’t a value judgment about quality. It’s a recognition that different types of fear work on different psychological levels and serve different purposes. Understanding this hierarchy—and when to deploy each—separates effective horror from cheap scares. ...

A corpse. A locked room. No way in or out. The locked room mystery is the purest distillation of detective fiction—an impossible crime that demands a logical solution. It’s also a covenant between author and reader more sacred than any other genre. This is fair-play detective fiction, where the writer makes an implicit promise: You have all the clues you need. The solution is possible. I am not cheating. Break that promise, and your reader will never forgive you. ...

The Millennium Falcon is a piece of junk. The cockpit chairs are mismatched. Panels are held together with what looks like duct tape. Wiring is exposed. The hyperdrive fails constantly. Everything looks jury-rigged, patched, and held together through sheer stubbornness. And that’s exactly why we believe in it. The Falcon feels lived-in. It has a history we never see but constantly sense. It’s been flown hard, repaired poorly, modified desperately, and loved despite all its flaws. ...

Brandon Sanderson, one of fantasy’s most prolific worldbuilders, articulated something that had been true of great fantasy for decades but rarely stated explicitly: Magic isn’t about being magical. It’s about being a tool for storytelling. And like any tool, magic systems work better when they follow certain principles. Sanderson codified these into what’s now known as Sanderson’s Laws of Magic. They’re not rigid rules but design principles that help you create magic systems that serve your story instead of undermining it. ...

Most stories treat setting as backdrop—a stage where characters perform. The action happens; the world just… is. But some stories do something different. The setting doesn’t just sit there. It acts. It has personality, desires, resistance. It shapes events as much as any character. This is setting as character, and when done well, it transforms worldbuilding from description into dramatic force. What Does “Setting as Character” Actually Mean? A setting becomes a character when it possesses these qualities: ...

In 1917, Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky introduced a concept that would fundamentally change how we think about art: ostranenie—defamiliarization, or “making strange.” His insight was radical: The purpose of art isn’t to make us comfortable. It’s to make us see again. We spend our lives on autopilot, perceiving the world through habits and categories. We don’t see a chair—we see “chair,” the concept. We don’t experience morning coffee—we execute a routine. ...

Ernest Hemingway had a simple rule for writing: if you know something well enough, you can omit it, and the reader will feel its presence like the bulk of an iceberg beneath the water. He called it the Iceberg Theory (or the Theory of Omission), and it’s perhaps the most powerful worldbuilding principle ever articulated. Show only the tip—10% of what you know. But you must know the other 90%. ...