Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
The Unspoken Rules That Make or Break a Writing Group Writing groups can be transformative. They can also be the thing that makes you quit writing for six months. The difference almost always comes do...
Read article →Comparing Yourself to Other Writers: How to Stop and Why It Matters The impulse arrives at the worst moments. You've just finished reading something brilliant — or scrolling through someone's announce...
Read article →Creative Identity Beyond Output: You Are Not Your Word Count There's a particular violence in the way productivity culture has colonized creative writing communities. The word count trackers. The mont...
Read article →The Feeling That Arrived With the Writing At some point, and usually at an inconvenient one — right after finishing a piece you were proud of, or during a conversation where someone asked about your w...
Read article →Writing Through Depression: How to Create When the Well Feels Dry There's a version of this essay that opens with a romanticization of the depressed artist — a mention of Plath or Woolf, a suggestion...
Read article →Morning Pages: Julia Cameron's Practice and the Science Behind It Julia Cameron did not invent free-writing. Stream-of-consciousness as a technique has been part of literary modernism since at least t...
Read article →How Perfectionism Kills Creativity and What to Do Instead Perfectionism presents itself as a virtue. It tells you it's the reason you care about quality, the reason your work is better than average, t...
Read article →Writing Diverse Characters Authentically Without Stereotypes There's a version of this conversation that turns every writing session into an anxiety spiral. Writers become so worried about getting div...
Read article →The Unreliable Narrator: Techniques for Controlled Deception in Fiction The unreliable narrator is one of fiction's most powerful tools and one of its most frequently mishandled ones. When it works —...
Read article →The World Building Checklist Every Fiction Writer Needs Most world building advice focuses on the wrong end of the problem. Writers are told to invent geography, design currencies, sketch out politica...
Read article →Pacing in Fiction: How to Control the Speed of Your Story Pacing is the thing readers describe when they say a book was "impossible to put down" or "started slow but I'm glad I stayed with it" or "fel...
Read article →Fear of Judgment: How to Write Honestly When You're Terrified of Being Read Every writer who has ever written something true has felt it — the specific cold fear that arrives partway through a honest...
Read article →The Neuroscience of Writer's Block: Why Your Brain Freezes and How to Unfreeze It Writer's block is not a character flaw. It is not a sign that you lack talent, discipline, or a genuine calling to wri...
Read article →How to Write Natural Dialogue That Actually Sounds Like People Talking The hardest part about writing dialogue is that it looks easy. It's just people talking, right? Two characters exchanging words o...
Read article →Writing Compelling Villains: Beyond Evil for Evil's Sake The villain who wants to destroy the world because he wants to destroy the world is one of the most durable failures in fiction. He shows up ev...
Read article →Character Motivation: How to Write Characters Who Feel Real The moment a character does something that makes a reader think "but why would they do that?" — the spell breaks. It doesn't matter how beau...
Read article →Plot Structure Alternatives to the Three-Act Formula The three-act structure is genuinely useful. That's why it keeps showing up in screenwriting manuals and fiction workshops. It maps onto something...
Read article →Show Don't Tell: What the Rule Actually Means and How to Apply It Every writing workshop eventually produces someone who announces, with great confidence, that you must always show, never tell. The ru...
Read article →First Person vs Third Person: Choosing the Right POV for Your Story Point of view is the most consequential craft decision a writer makes, and it's often made too quickly — by default, by habit, or by...
Read article →There is a specific visual register that has become unmistakable in contemporary culture: the grain of analog film, the saturated palette of a seventies paperback cover, the rounded corners and warm c...
Read article →Almost everyone who has attended one approaches the school reunion with some version of the same basic anxiety. It surfaces in different forms — the wardrobe obsession that starts weeks before, the st...
Read article →Every few years, something old comes back. The fashion item that was considered dated becomes cool again. The musical genre that was declared finished finds a new generation. The visual style associat...
Read article →There are foods that do not simply taste good. They do something else, something harder to name — a settling, a warmth that seems to reach past the palate into the chest. Macaroni and cheese, chicken...
Read article →Something happens around mid-November that is hard to account for purely in terms of weather or obligation. The decorations appear, a particular music begins circulating, and something in the emotiona...
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