Essays
The newest essay is “The Twelve Prosaic Virtues”, posted on 2023-12-15.- “Sensory Reifiction: the Advanced Lecture on ‘Show, Don't Tell’” explores one of the most common pieces of writing advice. I break "Show, Don't Tell" down into seven distinct yet overlapping principles, each with their own applications and motivations.
- “Actions are Louder: On Writing Characters” gives a few tools for thinking about, analyzing, and iterating on characters.
- “Ur-Development, or Another Unified Theory of Plot” covers the broadest view of what stories are, and what structures they exhibit. There are many ways of breaking a story down, into acts or plot beats, and I advance a general model that relates to a variety of them.
- “Outlines as Temporarily Embarrassed Drafts” is a follow up to the above, takes the above principles, refining and applying them to present a step by step guide to outlining a new story.
- “Wheels Within Wheels: the Formal Art of Spinning Scenes” is a long, comprehensive guide to outlining and structuring scene via the use of my ‘scene formulas’, including a thorough look at a story outlined using these methods.
- “The Twelve Prosaic Virtues” defines what prose is and presents twelve concepts for understanding what good prose is requires and achieves.
- “Pacing Is Madness” dissects what it means for stories to fast or slow pacing, and what tools exist to control this.
- “Stylistic Annealing” argues that following rules has value beyond the obvious, and discusses how to improve prose.
- “Xenodetermism: An Introduction” is about aliens. I write a lot of nonhuman characters, and often get asked for advice portraying them convincingly. This is that promised essay, which illustrates the principles involved in differentiating an alien character from a human one.
- “Dissecting the False Hydra” explores the mechanics that might undergird a systemic take on Arnold K's famous monster. I come up with a compelling basis for the erasure mechanism, analyze how a culture might respond to the existence of hydrae, and spin up new false hydrae which operate on similar mechanics.
- “A Closer Look At Time Travel and Probability” aims to examine what it means to for information to travel backward in time, and provides models for what we should expect to come out of a small time machine. There’s math, and, I hope, an uncommonly rigorous level of retrocausal argumentation.
Writing Advice
Worldbuilding Advice
Mu
- “Complexity is Not Objective” is unusual for this site; it’s a rebuttal to an argument about determining objective truth I had on discord with a friend. (I won the argument.)
- “We Must Convey What the Video Cannot: a Big Joel Companion Piece” explains a confusing video essay. When the youtuber Big Joel released video called We Must Destroy What the Bomb Cannot, what did he mean by this?
Minor Essays
I'm often long winded, but sometimes I only have a small thought to share. These essays are only a few thousand words long.
- “A Small Theory of Detail” is, in some ways, a prelude to Sensory Reification, written just a few days beforehand. It explores the function of detail in fiction.
- “Some Notes on Fight Scene” gives a few pointers based on how I think about combat and action when I'm writing.
- “Problems with Pocket Dimension” pokes some holes in the physics of devices like pokeball or sealing scrolls, where large objects are packed in and carried around.
- “A Thought on Ra” uses a somewhat well-regarded web fiction to examine the pitfalls of explanations that are too powerful
- “Emphasis and Stuff” an old one explaining some low level mechanics about how word choice conveys emphasis and meaning.