Genres and story forms
Use the promises and pressures of a form without reducing the work to a formula.
How to write a short story that lands
How to write a short story: pick a single effect, start late, earn one reversal, and end on resonance instead of explanation.
How to write a novella
A novella runs 17,500 to 40,000 words. What fits inside: one arc, one viewpoint, one season — and how its pacing differs from a story or a novel.
Romance: the promise you must keep
Romance promises a happy ending, so the suspense moves to how and at what cost: load-bearing conflict, chemistry from attention, and beats readers know.
How to plot a mystery readers can't put down
How to plot a mystery: the crime's timeline vs the investigation's, an honest clue economy, suspects as full stories, and the reveal that plays fair.
Thriller pacing: ticking clocks, dread, and escalation
How to write a thriller that holds pressure: clocks that cost something, dread versus surprise, escalation that never resets, and heroes with limits.
Horror on the page: writing dread
Write horror by rationing the monster: King's terror-over-gore ranking, the half-seen thing, pressure and release, and why explaining it shrinks it.
How to build a magic system that doesn’t break your story
Sanderson's First Law: magic solves problems only in proportion to how well the reader understands it — plus costs, limits, and saga consistency.
Science fiction: ideas vs. furniture
How to tell the one new thing in your science fiction story from the set dressing around it, and how to follow its consequences all the way through.
Worldbuilding without the wiki trap
How to build a fictional world without the wiki trap: scene-first worldbuilding for fantasy novels, with rules, consequences, and canon that holds.
Historical fiction: research, voice, and the one true detail
Spend one true detail, not ten: period voice by subtraction, named archives from Old Bailey Online to Chronicling America, and anachronism triage.
How to research a novel (without disappearing into it)
A working method for research for fiction: just-in-time lookups, keeping sources attached to claims, and knowing which details you invented.
How to write a memoir
A memoir is a slice of a life, not a span: choose the subject, reconstruct without inventing, and split the then-self from the now-self.
Comedy in prose: writing funny novels
How comic novels work: voice as the engine, timing built into sentence rhythm, deadpan point of view, running gags, and jokes that carry real stakes.