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I think that writing characters through the lens of 'archetypes' might be artificially creating some difficulty here. If your character is designed based on present values for how they should act rather than being tailor-made to the story you want to tell and developed from your own...

At the heart of any story should be the drama within and between your characters. I think a lot of folks get sidetracked by the spectacle (the magical duels) and their writing suffers for it. Politics, while also spectacle to a degree, much more easily lends itself to developing the kind of...

I plan a bit here and there. I've found that planning everything out in detail is really helpful for being able to stick to a deadline, but I can also get caught up in outlining and never actually get around to writing anything. I'd say most often, I'll paint in really broad strokes and then...

I typically don't find much of a difference between the two. Every story beat is an important moment for one character or another and every major moment of characterization is an important scene in the story. For me, this means a Google Sheet with a set of cells for each chapter: one for the...

Absolutely. It's always enjoyable to see what other people are doing with the same tools.

I'm generally pretty vague about place descriptions, unless the layout of a place is especially important. I like to leave a lot of room for interpretation and I find that the more I try to nail down on the page the specifics of how a place, person, or thing looks in my mind, the more I wind up...

More than anything, I would like to make someone else feel something. If I could make even one person feel the way I have felt reading the stories that have stuck with me most, that would be enough.

I disagree with the idea that you've given too much exposition at the start of the chapter. I think it's perfectly fine to start with a description of your setting and your protagonist. The issue stems from the way you've written it. Sometimes you are too ornate and sometimes too specific, like...

This is such an insane thing to say

I don’t have any tips or tricks—I don’t have a whole lot of practice when it comes to writing especially difficult or relentless stories—but I do know that Christopher Buehlman does an excellent job of this in his novel, Between Two Fires. It can be a harrowing read at times, but he is so, so...

That depends. What is divinity to you? What does it represent in your story? How do you want to handle immortality thematically? What opinions do you want to express about longevity, the nature of human identity and relationships? About change and desire? In a story of mine, immortality (and the...

I wouldn't really call it interesting, but I write in two columns on Google Docs rather than just centering the text across the page. I think it helps psychologically for me to fill the page from top-to-bottom first, even if it's not full from left to right just yet.

It can be so exhausting, but I've always found it worthwhile in the end. Keep it up!

There's always benefit in editing old work. Rewriting is a skill and not only will you get better at it with practice, but it will also improve your drafting. You'll learn very quickly what your strengths and weaknesses are and consider them more when writing something through the first time.

Listen buddy, I think you should go outside for a bit.

‘Kakistocracy’ is much more of a descriptive term than anything else. It’s used to describe nations by those who are critical of the state and is less a form of government than a term used to criticize any particular government. They exist, certainly, in that there are and have been many deeply...

‘Light as madness’ is an especially strong idea, I think. Taken from ‘light as knowledge,’ you can play a lot with knowledge (of the unknown, the not-meant-to-be-understood) as a destructive force. I’m thinking of VanderMeer’s Annihilation, Lovecraft’s ‘Colour Out of Space’, and so on. The idea...

I think you’ve really missed some fundamental points here. It’s not about ‘purity’ or ‘good books’ vs ‘bad books’ or how well a book sells or how much money a book earns—whatever those things mean to you—it’s about meaning and how intentionality creates meaning. When it comes to art, the small...

Pacing is such a hard thing to master. It takes a lot of study and practice to really get a grip on it. These are some great tips.

There have already been entire libraries written about how abominable AI is as a creative tool, how sickly it makes our art, and so on and so on. I could spend all day reiterating points already made a thousand times and made a thousand times more eloquently than I could ever hope to write, so...