Category: Narrative Craft

There’s a particular type of person who will, upon hearing you’re a writer, say, I have a book inside me. They’ll say it with the kind of certainty that suggests it’s a fully formed thing, waiting patiently for its moment. They don’t say they want to write a book. They say they have one. As…

The book in your head is perfect. Every scene is cinematic, every character is fully realized, every twist lands exactly as it should. There are no awkward sentences, no pacing issues, no clunky dialogue. But the second you start writing? Something breaks. The words don’t flow the way you imagined. The dialogue feels stiff. The…

Before stories lived on paper, they had to live in the mind. For thousands of years, before printing presses and digital archives, stories weren’t something you read—they were something you remembered. Bards, poets, and oral storytellers carried entire epics in their heads, able to recite thousands of lines without missing a beat. How did they…

There’s a moment before you open an old manuscript—before you scroll through the draft you haven’t touched in months—when the book exists in a perfect quantum state. It could be brilliant. It could be terrible. It could be both. This is Schrödinger’s Draft, the paradox where a book is simultaneously a masterpiece and a disaster,…

Some writers don’t just hear words. They see them. For them, a sentence isn’t just a string of letters—it’s a texture, a color, a weight. Some names feel jagged, others smooth. Some words taste like metal, others like burnt sugar. This is synesthesia, a neurological trait where the senses blend together—where sound might have color,…

Some writers can’t stop writing. Not in the motivated, productive sense—where inspiration strikes and the words pour out effortlessly. This is something different. This is a compulsion, an almost physical need to put words down, to keep going even when there’s nothing left to say. The mind overflows, the hand follows, and the act of…

Some stories just work. The beats fall into place, the structure feels inevitable, and the ending lands exactly where it should. It’s easy to assume this is instinct—some unconscious talent that lets writers intuitively shape a compelling narrative. But what if it’s something deeper? What if storytelling isn’t just an art we learn, but a…

Some ideas don’t feel like ideas. They don’t arrive politely, waiting to be developed at a reasonable pace. They invade. They plant themselves in your mind and refuse to leave, hijacking your thoughts, demanding your time. You’re trying to focus on something else—work, sleep, a conversation—but the idea keeps pressing in, insistent, insatiable. Some writers…

Spend enough time writing horror, and you start noticing things. The creak of a floorboard sounds different. The shadow in the hallway seems darker. Maybe it’s just your imagination—or maybe your brain is rewiring itself, training you to see fear everywhere. Horror writers talk about this all the time. They describe becoming hyper-aware of their…

Some writers never actually write their books. They just rewrite the beginning. Over and over, they tweak the first chapter, adjusting the opening lines, restructuring the setup, fine-tuning the tone. They convince themselves they’re making progress, but in reality, they’re stuck in a loop—trapped in the early pages, forever circling the start but never moving…