Category: fiction

• Bridging the personal and the universal

  A key component in great writing is building bridges between the personal and the universal. Without specific incarnation, universals revert to truisms. The insight you’re trying to articulate may be foundational, but cliché drains it of color and weight. Aphorisms can blaze bright on social media because aspiration is a potent fuel for sharing, but…

• The Path

  The girl entered the Dark Forest. Leaves whispered. Shadows swirled. Bright eyes gleamed. Mud sucked at her boots. She evaded the bandits, won over the fairies, escaped the quicksand, emasculated the creepy lumberjack, survived the poison thorns, defeated the monsters, fed wild carrots to the unicorn, slipped away from the strangling vines, and outsmarted the…

• Granular verisimilitude

  You know you have a good editor—thanks Tim!—when they point out that the narratively-necessary-but-totally-arbitrary-8-digit number in your novel manuscript is unlikely to have the unique digits you thought would make it appear random because among the 100 million 8-digit numbers, there are only about 1.8 million whose digits are all different. So your number is…

• The Mad King

  The mad king’s madness was the source of his power, for by wrongly ascribing subtle reason to his actions, his enemies defeated themselves. But having vanquished his enemies, his victory proved Pyrrhic, for the mad king’s madness stoked internecine feuds just as surely as it had undermined his foes. The mad king was never dethroned,…