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Does a vibe check sound less than serious to you? As a reason for exploring new paths, it’s perfectly reasonable. After all, that’s how Einstein’s discovery of General Relativity began.

There’s a theory in quantum mechanics called superdeterminism that suggests that everything was determined from the beginning. Entangled particles don’t have to communicate instantaneously across great distances because their states were chosen from the foundation of time. Physicists hate it.

If it seems odd that two fundamentally similar theories, the Block Universe and superdeterminism, should have had vastly different receptions, the difference is the intended audience. The Block Universe flows naturally from General Relativity, and those who work math on such cosmic scales aren’t really concerned with the philosophical difficulties. If it works, go with it. Meanwhile, superdeterminism neuters the quantum physicist by eliminating measurement independence and turning probability into a shell game.

There’s another attempt to explain away “spooky action at a distance” known as the theory of retrocausality. It states that when an entangled particle determines its spin, that causes its entangled mate to choose the opposite spin in the past. Physicists hate it too.

On the other hand, within string theory, black hole physics, and quantum gravity, physicists are fans of an idea called the ER = EPR conjecture. When there’s no observational proof, physicists stick to what produces the best math. Right now, ER = EPR isn’t something they can test, but it’s a useful mathematical analogy. As for the vibe check, this one’s a winner, and when I think of how spacetime is constructed, this is the model I use.

It’s called a conjecture. I’d assumed that was something weaker than a hypothesis, but the opposite is true. A hypothesis starts as an idea, and it can be called a hypothesis before you ever test it or gather evidence. This is called a conjecture because it’s backed by strong theoretical clues but lacks a logical proof.

The name stands for Einstein-Rosen bridges = Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen, or in other words, wormholes equal quantum entanglement. According to the conjecture, when quantum particles are entangled, they’re connected by a microscopic, non-traversable wormhole.

Now, if that’s all it was, I wouldn’t care much, but it’s much more than an idea for how entangled particles communicate. It suggests that the geometry of spacetime is entirely made of entangled particles and the tiny wormholes that connect them. That’s exciting, because when we say that mass curves the geometry of space, what does that even mean? No theory suggests there’s a pre-existing grid onto which spacetime secures itself. General Relativity tells us that spacetime is that grid. It’s not laid out on top of anything. With ER = EPR, we have actual nodes and lines that shape an emergent geometry of space and which are logically impacted by mass and energy. It’s beautiful.

I need to clarify my point on “nodes and lines” as I’m not suggesting the wormholes form a grid as we visualize it. Outside of gravitational pull, the underlying structure of spacetime is most likely frothy, more akin to the drool of a rabid dog than the iron pillars we use to construct a building. It’s also simply messy to refer to the wormholes as lines which, however you twist them, still sounds like a a filament through space. The wormholes are space, and they aren’t stable filaments but shifting probabilities of connection between the entangles pairs.

Vastly important for this particular discussion, because ER = EPR sees space and time as emergent properties, the present can be seen as the current configuration of the quantum network. Space and time are macroscopic illusions. If we view time this way, it’s generally labeled under the philosophical concept of presentism, but that term has baggage. The complexity of wormholes work like the rings of a tree, revealing their age. Philosophical presentism would ask why the present would carry a history of the past if only the “now” is real, but that’s nonsense. Whether through fossils or baryon acoustic oscillations, the past leaves its mark on the present. The past and the future simply do not exist in a higher dimensional expression of our reality.

Variations of presentism are also challenged by General Relativity. If the present is local and relative, which “now” are we referring to if only the “now” exists? If the ER = EPR conjecture is right, spacetime is fluid. Our issues with simultaneity stem from an attempt to conform a fluid reality to a rigid graph.

There’s no need for quantum particles to travel back in time or for all of existence to be predetermined. Space and time are illusory, but wasn’t that always the case? What’s given a chance to be substantial is what it means to be human. That’s not an illusion.

The conjecture does create problems, however.

When physicists say that the present, past, and future all exist at the same time, they’re referring to that Block Universe hypothesis. This coordinate plane of time seems necessary for gravity to be a result of mass bending spacetime, a core principle of General Relativity.

Hopefully, in future essays, we’ll deal with the proper theories that attempt to resolve this. For now, allow me to share my thoughts. First, the problem I described is with presentism, and I’ve said that has baggage. It seems very different to me to suggest that the future and past do not coexist with the present than it is to suggest the present is all there is. That difference is exemplified in presentism’s confusion over the present containing a record of the past.

In what I’ve described above, the past isn’t a physical space, but it used to be. It’s a chain of prior quantum configurations, what we experience as a memory-chain of lived moments. The future isn’t the next fixed coordinate but a multitude of probabilities.

What I called a “memory-chain” isn’t dependent on us as conscious observers. Quantum Darwinism is a theory of time where the environment stands witness to quantum states. It’s a redundancy of recorded history that allows multiple observers to agree on an objective past without ever having observed the quantum states directly. It’s a memory-chain created not only in our subjective mental recall but across the universe in the evidence it’s left behind. We’re used to this on a macro scale. The striations of the earth stand witness to past floods and geological violence. Fossilization captures a record of past species. BAO are the remnants of ripples through the early universe. On a micro scale, scattered photons are an example, bearing witness to a former quantum state.

Lose all the baggage. The “now” is not universal. Relativity is real, and in a universe built on superposition and entanglement, we don’t need to imagine a frozen construct of time to make relativity work. That’s always been a convenient simplification.

Time is bent by the process of mass slowing it down. If we’re stuck imagining time as a physical thing that exists and which contains essential measurements, then clocks ticking differently and the warping of spacetime become puzzles that require philosophical assumptions to solve. If time is an emergent property of a universe structured through entanglement, I see gravity working exactly as Einstein said, but with mass changing the rate of information processing in the local quantum network. We saw a little of that in the first essay when we discussed the Entropic Gravity hypothesis.

ER = EPR was proposed by Juan Maldacena and Lennard Susskind in 2013. Quantum complexity was proposed by Leonard Susskind, Adam Brown, and Bran Swingle in 2014. Quantum Darwinism was first proposed by Wojciech H. Zurek in 2003. Presentism was first conceptualized by Aristotle around 350 BCE.

I don’t meant to call Aristotle’s ideas nonsense. What frustrates me is the lumping of an attempted exploration of reality with a predefined framework and then discounting that exploration because of the faults found in the framework. It’s a logical fallacy and an example of either a Straw Man Argument or Guilt by Association.

As one final point, the Block Universe is also known as eternalism, and I want to reiterate that it is the leading hypothesis. While I see it as a mathematical convenience, someone once said eternalism was proven by gravity waves. This is not the case because gravitational ripples require four-dimensional spacetime but not a future that currently exists elsewhere. I believe the logical leap comes from assuming four-dimensional spacetime necessitates a block universe, and so, if he were really saying gravitational waves prove four-dimensional spacetime, I agree. Physicists may talk about the Block Universe as if it were established fact without actually using those words, but that’s different. They’re not required to hedge everything they say, and while it may blur the line between popular theories and established fact, it’s less confusing and provokes the imagination with possibilities, hopefully inspiring a new generation of physicists.

— Thaddeus Thomas

P.S. All corrections welcome.

Find all my essays on physics here.

COMING SOON: In physics, the exploration of ER = EPR will continue for two more weeks with postings each Thursday morning. In writing-about-writing, now that I’m back in town, I’ll start posting chapters of my book on the art of prose. However, that doesn’t meant I have a start date or a schedule. My plan is to edit chapter one and post early next week, but that’s not a promise. In fiction, I’m encouraged to return to my short story WIP and hope to start publishing fiction again soon.

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The mass of the earth curves spacetime, and it’s the time aspect I had forgotten. The earth accelerates at a constant rate across this curved geometry of the universe, but not in the three spatial dimensions. Our experience of gravity is a physical manifestation of the earth traveling through time.

By contrast, the dark energy of “empty” space creates a negative pressure that pushes space out, smoothly, in all directions. Mass has a center of gravity toward which it curves spacetime. Dark energy has no such center, and so the push that moves galaxies apart brings with it no curve, as long as we’re talking about empty space.

This is where black holes and the Cosmological Coupling Hypothesis comes into play. Standard cosmology sees the center of a black hole as a singularity. That’s a problem because information is destroyed in the singularity, and quantum mechanics says information can never be destroyed. Physicists have offered theories for how the universe might get around this, but the Cosmological Coupling Hypothesis does so by getting rid of singularities altogether. Behind the event horizon, a black hole is filled with dark energy.

The Cosmological Coupling Hypothesis gets its name from the fact that unlike the earth, a black hole doesn’t have a surface area of matter. Its surface area is the event horizon which itself is curved spacetime. According to the hypothesis, that couples the black hole to the fabric of the universe, and as the universe expands, so does the black hole. Meanwhile, the dark energy within the black hole has its own negative pressure pressing out against the event horizon, expanding the black hole in volume and in turn adding to the pressure that manifests as the expanding universe.

As a storyteller, I want to talk about the number of ways that observational cosmology has supported this hypothesis in recent months. Black holes in cold-gas galaxies are expanding despite a lack of mass-intake to trigger that expansion, and they are doing so at a rate that equals the predicted constant given by the Cosmological Coupling Hypothesis. Additionally, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has shown that dark energy might not be a constant but rather is evolving at a rate consistent with the birth and death of stars, and thus with the birth rate of black holes. However, physicists are more cautious than storytellers. The apparent proof could be a case of confirmation bias with the expansion being drawn from some unknown variable. The idea still needs time to prove itself.

Einstein’s insight that local gravity is identical to a uniformly accelerating frame of reference is known as the Equivalence Principle. The term dark energy was coined by Michael Turner, but it was discovered earlier, in 1998, through the Nobel prize-winning work of Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, and Adam Riess. They were the first to realize that the universe isn’t just expanding but that its expansion is accelerating. Kevin Croker is the theoretical physicist behind the Cosmological Coupling Hypothesis along with astrophysicist Duncan Farrah who also led the efforts to produce the first real-world observations supporting the concept.

Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) are patterns of galaxies across the universe, marking the death of great waves that once tore through the early universe. They act like a cosmic clock that DESI focused upon and which data Duncan Farrah studied to demonstrate the evolving nature of dark energy.

In the first 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was much smaller and filled with a hot, dense plasma, too hot for electrons to attach to baryons (protons and neutrons). These free-moving electrons constantly collided with photons, keeping them coupled to the plasma. Roughly 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the temperature of the universe cooled to 3000 Kelvin, allowing baryons to trap electrons. For the first time photons were decoupled from the plasma, and over a few thousand years, space went from opaque to transparent. This escape of light gave us the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).

In the days of that hot plasma, particles would attempt to cluster due to gravity, only to be thrust apart by their own radiation. This created acoustic waves, spherical pressure ripples that ripped through the baryonic plasma, expanding at half the speed of light. When the universe cooled enough and light decoupled from the plasma and escaped, those waves froze as patterns of baryonic matter, influencing the formation of galaxies along these ancient rims.

On today’s scale, the most massive of those rings consistently have a radius of 150 megaparsecs or 490 million light-years. That consistency allows them to act as a standard candle, and if distance makes them appear smaller than is predicted by the redshift of their light, that tells us the intervening space has expanded since that light was emitted.

The standard model assumes dark energy is a constant, but the readings from DESI suggest dark energy is evolving; the expansion of space is accelerating, but that acceleration was stronger in the past and has recently begun to weaken. That weakening dark-energy curve matches a universe where dark energy is tied to cosmologically coupled black holes: star formation slows down; fewer coupled black holes are created; and the acceleration of impact from the universe’s dark energy weakens.

On a final note, the hypothesis also rescues small black holes, formed early in our universe, as a contender for dark matter. In the standard model, that doesn’t work because the black holes would have lost so much mass to Hawking radiation in that time that they would have since evaporated or exploded. A cosmologically coupled black hole, however, can achieve a stable survival boundary where the mass lost to Hawking radiation is equivalent to the mass gained from cosmic expansion.

— Thaddeus Thomas

P.S. All corrections are welcome.

This was the second essay in the series. You can find the first one here:

Once again, I’m reminded of when I asked my early elementary school teacher if it’s possible to divide a small number by a larger one. She lied and said no because I wouldn’t be ready for that possibility for a couple more years. The way I’m learning physics, there’s no determination made whether I’m ready for the answers my questions produce. I simply get my answers. Moreover, imagine if fractions and decimals were only hypothetical and not accepted math. In this analogy, I’m new to basic arithmetic, but if I ask the question, I’ll get my answer with very little concern over what’s settled and what’s theoretical.

That’s how I’m learning, and I try to share what interests me using much of the same structure I use to pursue my answers. I highlight connections between ideas, and these will regularly fall in a few areas: quantum mechanics, gravity and spacetime, deep space and dark energy, and black holes.

As for what’s theoretical and what’s settled, everything I touched upon today should be settled physics until we reach the Cosmological Coupling Hypothesis. I’ve noted that the standard model considers dark energy a constant, but I didn’t mention that it also states that gravity once held expansion back and only recently did acceleration of expansion begin. That’s very different from Farrah’s interpretations of the DESI information.

Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) and their birth in the early years of the universe seem settled. DESI is simply the instrumentation by which dark energy is studied. Farrah’s interpretation of those results makes certain assumptions that are being rigorously challenged because they support a hypothesis that would upend our understanding of black holes and dark energy, as well as potentially undermine the standard candles and rulers scientists have relied upon in their studies of the universe.

Find all my essays on physics here.

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In the empty space between galaxies, those qubits fill the volume of space, achieving maximum entropy, which in quantum mechanics refers to informational density. This density of information in what we see as empty space expands the volume of space. We call that information dark energy.

By contrast, according to something known as the Holographic Principle, massive objects don’t draw information into their volume but onto their surface area, and a recent hypothesis by Erik Verlinde tells us that from this quantum entropy, gravity emerges. Einstein’s General Relativity told us that mass curves spacetime, creating our experience of gravity, but Relativity doesn’t tell us how this happens. Theories have been sought that would produce gravity as a fundamental force alongside electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces, but in Verlinde’s theory of Entropic Gravity, gravity isn’t one of the fundamental forces but rather emerges from them.

In standard cosmology, we have both dark energy (expanding the universe) and dark matter (holding the outer edges of galaxies together), but in the Entropic Gravity hypothesis, dark energy isn’t a smooth, repulsive fluid but (as described above) the fundamental microscopic data of the universe. Dark matter is done away with entirely. In its place, matter and dark energy interact with the bordering spacetime between them, creating the elasticity needed to keep the outermost systems in place. In these areas, Entropic Gravity offers solutions that Relativity cannot, but under the right circumstances, from the computations of Entropic Gravity, the equations of General Relativity emerge.

David Mermin coined the phrase “shut up and do the math.” Max Tegmark proposed the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. Max Planck determined the Planck length. Leonard Susskind and Gerard ‘t Hooft developed the Holographic Principle within String Theory, and Erik Verlinde proposed Entropic Gravity.

In early 2026, the James Webb Space Telescope mapped a web of interconnected clumps of dark matter, the very substance Entropic Gravity calls illusory. It accomplished this by measuring how dark matter’s gravity warps the light of background galaxies. In standard cosmology it’s explained as a network of real, physical particles, yet undiscovered. Entropic Gravity describes this gravitational web as the strain imposed upon bordering spacetime by the interaction of matter and quantum information.

The outer arms of a galaxy are an example of a low-acceleration zone, which is one of those areas Relativity cannot explain without the addition of a mass we cannot see. Entropic Gravity, however, can.

Does this prove Entropic Gravity? No. These are all open questions, but my intent is not to prove which is the correct interpretation of the universe. Instead, this is the opening of the interesting story I wish to share about the math we call physics.

— Thaddeus Thomas

P.S. All corrections are welcome.

I have no idea how soon or how long it will be before the next entry in this series. The opening to this essay has been gnawing at me for days, and now my mind can move on to other things.

I have no background in any of this, but its something I ponder before going to bed. For a while, I’ve thought that the best way to continue my informal studies is to write about them, and so the writing has begun. Hopefully, there will be interest in seeing it continue.

Find all my essays on physics here.

Once, I would have said the answer is suspense, but that begins too late. To explain why, let me reference that quote from Hitchcock which explains the difference between suspense and surprise. He begins with us seeing a bomb beneath the table, but for our purposes, that’s where we stop. We see the bomb and that provokes a question. Will the people at the table discover the bomb before it’s too late? The reader, even if unintentionally, answers that question and then reads to see if she’s right. She makes a prediction, and, like a man betting on a greyhound, she’s invested in the outcome. Everything Hitchcock talked about was the suspense between the prediction and the reveal, but it begins with provoking the prediction.

The investment is gone once the reveal is made. We’ve been screaming at Hitchcock’s guests, but after the bomb goes off, then what? The reader made her bet, and at the end of the race, win or lose, the investment in the outcome is gone. We either catch her with the next race, give her new dogs to bet on, or she’s going home.

It’s prediction after prediction after prediction, and our story must start with the first race and end with last.

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As E. M. Forrester said, “[The story] can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next.” If the reader doesn’t want to know, it’s because she’s not invested, and that happens for a few particular reasons. There’s no intriguing question to provoke a prediction; the question’s been answered without a new question to take its place; or the story has presented a series of questions, but their answers were too obvious.

When we compare good and bad action films, we see a variation of this. In Die Hard, we get a wide shot of John McClane and various villains on the roof before they come in contact with one another. We understand the geography, the threat, and the characters involved. Our minds anticipate the danger and predict possible outcomes. In bad action films, we’re not sure where the characters are. Bad guys jump out of nowhere and throw a few punches before being dispatched. The viewer isn’t actively engaged in the set up of the action scene.

Staging such a shot seems unrelated to writing stories that hold a reader’s interest, but the underlying principle is the same because that roof-top shot was telling its own story in a few seconds. Visually, it did exactly what we’re talking about here, setting up characters and stakes and asking a question the viewer must answer.

On a macro scale, survival is a possible question, but on a micro scale, the possibilities are limited. Maybe McClane gets captured. Maybe he gets injured or someone else dies. Maybe he escapes. In each scenario, the how becomes more important than the what. A surprising escape we never anticipated, that thrills us, but remember, that thrill is short lived. When McClane ties himself to a fire hose and jumps, that’s a surprising solution, but then he’s stuck on the side of the building. He shoots his way through the glass, but then the hose wheel disconnects and what had been his life line now threatens to drag him to his doom.

It’s a series of quick predictions, and as the last one ends, it leads into another where McClane is ambushed by a terrorist hungry for revenge. In an action film, the questions posed generally involve action, but the principles apply to all storytelling. In My Dinner with Andre, the questions posed are centered on the conversation. For one movie, the ultimate stakes are survival for McClane and his estranged wife. For the other, the ultimate stakes are a philosophically-imposed social alienation and an escape from the captivity of the mind. Throughout each film, questions are raised for the viewer to answer, small questions which resonate with the story’s big question. It’s the same for your story. It’s the same for mine.

Is calling it a prediction meaningful compared to the old phrase of “wanting to know what happens next?” Yes, it’s different in an instructive way. It tells us that our writing must present enough information, and withhold enough information, to compel a reader to predict an outcome for the quantum of story they’re reading.

I can think of 007 reasons not to call it a quantum of story, but a quantum is a small, discrete package of information. In our usage, it might be a sequence of events or it might be a single moment within that sequence. It fits.

Our focus on prediction reveals that this is the mechanism that sustains interest and keeps the reader invested. If the reader doesn’t have enough information to propose a possible outcome, that quantum needs a rewrite. Tell your story in such a way that the reader has an emotional or logical understanding of what’s at stake for whom, and psychology will drive her to predict how the problem might be resolved. We fail to ask a question when our quantum is vague or confusing. A reader can’t predict an outcome if they don’t understand what’s happening.

If you’ve asked yourself why successful stories fail in so many ways, I’ll predict that provoking predictions is the answer. Mind you, a reader’s investment is still connected to personal taste. Taste determines whether the question we ask inspires any particular reader to make meaningful predictions. If the story’s not a good fit for a reader, there’s nothing to be done. We shake hands and move on, but if the story and the reader share the same tastes, prediction is everything.

— Thaddeus Thomas

1. It’s just the smart thing to do. People say distance allows you to return to project fresh, but what that really means is you fall out of sync as the writer. All those rhythms you assume are in the writing are no longer in your brain. You can’t mask your failures the same way you have been. You come back to the project and now you see as a reader does, hearing what’s on the page instead of what’s in your brain. It’s good to step back.

2. I’ve been asked to write another article for another Substack publication, and I haven’t even figured out what I’m going to write about.

3. I have a short story half done that needs some attention.

So, while I’m away from my book on writing, I’d love if some of you would be willing to beta read it for me. It’s about 35k words long, and I want to be modest in promoting the idea of you beta reading it. After all, I’m just me. Normally, you want some literary giant to write these things, but the fact is I’m really excited about how it turned out. I’ve been working on this because it can be hard to come by meaningful insight on writing for people who aren’t baby-fresh to the scene. This is the book I needed. At least, I think it is. I’ve not yet fallen out of sync as a writer, and I don’t know if it really transferred to the page. I need you to tell me where I’ve gone wrong.

Also, if you beta read the earlier version of the book from last year, let me know if you want your name mentioned.

Besides that, I need to move my mother so that’s she closer to me. My daughter will soon leave her law firm to clerk for a federal judge in the city, and the stock market on Friday was just brutal. It’s woken me in the night the last two days in a row. Other than my day job, managing the group home, that’s pretty much everything. That, and I’ve been wrestling with a great deal of anger over my dad. He’s been dead 14 years, and I never understood why older people held onto that stuff but I get it now. I really do.

I’m juicing. That’s something. Somehow, I’ve got to get in better shape, and this is where I start.

This might be the most newsletter-like newsletter I’ve ever sent out, but now you know what’s going on for me. I hope some of you will want to beta read the book. Let me know.

Thanks,

Thaddeus

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Building Meaning: Part Three

Authors: Stop Talking to Yourself

The 6 R’s of Building Meaning in Stories.

The most powerful ploy of the medical conspiracy theorist is to dredge up a “hidden” study that “the establishment is keeping from you.” The study is real, but the conspiracy isn’t because a study or an experiment on its own means nothing if it can’t be replicated. In our stories, we can think we’ve built meaning because of how we use a literary device to convey an idea, but any solitary attempt at meaning within a story is interpreted as noise. Even a direct speech, lacking in all subtlety or nuance, holds little lasting significance if that idea isn’t repeated elsewhere in the story.

The reader is Jodie Foster in the movie Contact. She’s not waiting for one weird signal; she’s looking for a pattern.

On my first read of A Farewell to Arms, I didn’t read that opening paragraph and say…oh! the leaves falling early that year symbolize early death by war! I’m not that clever.

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterwards the road bare and white except for the leaves.

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

How do we know that’s what Hemingway meant at all? Can’t a thing just be itself? But Hemingway doesn’t ask us to read his mind. He reiterates the meaning, and by the end of the chapter, we know what he’s talking about. The accumulative effect clues us in.

Later in the very brief chapter, he writes:

There was fighting for that mountain too, but it was not successful, and in the fall when the rains came the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black with rain. The vineyards were thin and bare-branched too and all the country wet and brown and dead with the autumn.

Leaves are falling. Branches are bare. Trunks are black with rain. All the country is wet and brown and dead, and we’re beginning to connect death with all this imagery. Experts rarely quote this passage because he comes right out and says the word dead. Deciphering this part doesn’t feel as clever, but the clues from one passage help us understand the other. Even if we only ever read the chapter once, we’re beginning to feel the meaning in our bones.

And then the chapter ends with this:

At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.

He takes all that imagery connected to death and gives it scope. Against the backdrop of war, cholera’s death toll of seven thousand seems small and inconsequential.

What’s more, that imagery is now baked into the novel and can be reflected and repeated elsewhere.

In chapter 2, Hemingway writes:

The forest had been green in the summer when we had come into the town but now there were the stumps and the broken trunks and the ground torn up, and one day at the end of the fall when I was out where the oak forest had been I saw a cloud coming over the mountain. It came very fast and the sun went a dull yellow and then everything was gray and the sky was covered and the cloud came on down the mountain and suddenly we were in it and it was snow. The snow slanted across the wind, the bare ground was covered, the stumps of trees projected, there was snow on the guns and there were paths in the snow going back to the latrines behind trenches.

In chapter 19, Catherine confesses that she fears the rain because sometimes she sees herself dead in it.

In chapter 21, the end of the lovers’ freedom is recognized by the changing of the leaves and, with it, the knowledge that Frederic must return to war.

Life and death is connected to and mirrored in the weather and the seasons. There’s plenty of rain and wet landscapes, and yes, the rain signifies that it’s raining, but the connection of death to rain and bare limbs reminds us that all these descriptions carry the reality of lost lives without Hemingway always having to say so.

Literary analysis fails us as writers because it so often studies these passages in isolation, and we learn the wrong lesson, that meaning is built in isolation when really it is built throughout the body of a work through repetition and reflection.

The author shapes language to carry something beyond its standard weight. We’re all secretly Tolkien, crafting our own invented language, but unlike elvish, the language we create uses our standard diction and carries a surface meaning that is recognizable and meaningful. We are throat singers, hitting two notes at once, our invented language carrying a second harmony beneath the surface.

Some of what we’ve invented is central to the ultimate meaning of the story and to its recontexualization and resolution, but some of that language simply allows the body of our work to say more than the plain meaning of the words we choose.

The six Rs of building meaning are repetition, reflection, recontextualization, reference, relex, and resolution. Relex usually refers to a naive form of language building that simply swaps out words for an existing syntax. If we don’t like that choice of words, we could go with riddle or rune, but I like the idea of an invented language carrying a simple meaning that cuts deep because it’s hidden from the conscious mind. This is the other way that literary analysis misleads us as writers. Sometimes, the greater power is in the meaning a reader feels but can’t articulate. They don’t have to decipher our meaning to feel its impact.

This invented language of ours has power because of the other five R’s. We repeat words and reflect back on previous meanings without direct repetition. We recontextualize an image to give it another meaning: The vineyards were thin and bare-branched too and all the country wet and brown and dead with the autumn.

We reference something outside the text and carry its meaning into our work. That alone doesn’t give the story meaning. Pattern establishes that meaning exists: repetition and reflection. Relex is made up of all the particular meanings we weave through a story, but it doesn’t tell us what the meaning is. Recontextualization, resolution, and reference are ways specific meaning is established.

A tree in winter symbolizing death is not an idea new to Hemingway, nor are falling leaves. He’s not referencing a text but a shared metaphorical language, something akin to Jungian archetypes. We can reference from any shared well of information, but on its own, it won’t be significant to the story and therefore won’t likely to be significant to the reader. Even if you state a meaning outright, it will disappear in the flow of information without a pattern to secure its importance.

Once a pattern is established then you can do interesting things with it. A pattern of trees in winter can suddenly be given new meaning through recontexualization, but for that new context to carry significance, the ideal scenario is a confluence of patterns.

In a small town where a missing man is now presumed dead, a tree remains leafless well into spring when others like it have sprung new life. The missing man planted that tree, and as the town discusses tearing it down, his sister decorates it in protest. The town spares the tree and has a vigil in the missing man’s honor with the sister decorating the site. Meanwhile, her parents are on the verge of divorce, their grief having torn them apart. She decorates the house and holds a memorial, not for her brother, but for her parents’ marriage with a remembrance of the joy they shared across the years. The next day, leaves sprout on the tree thought dead. The sister turns to see her parents, their eyes fixed on the tree, holding one another’s hands. She looks down the road, her heart full of anticipation and a sense of magic.

Repetition establishes a motif of celebration restoring life. Logically, it was coincidental for the tree but instrumental in saving her parents’ marriage. Will celebrating his life bring back her missing brother? I haven’t said, but the pattern establishes the same hope in our hearts as in hers. The death and celebration patterns converge and resolve into a shared recontextualization of new life.

How this story ends will depend on the type of tale we’re writing, but we might realize the site of the vigil is the heart of a dying town. The story of the tree catches the attention of the news and with it, the site of the brother’s vigil. People come to the town to witness the miracle tree and that inflow of visitors gives new life to the town.

And the traveling news reaches a man who’s forgotten who he is. Perhaps not literally. Maybe he simply stopped believing that anyone cared, but the story of the tree carries with it the meaning he had for the people in his town.

And he packs his bags to go home.

— Thaddeus Thomas

The Roles of the Six R’s of Meaning

Establishing patterns that confirm the presence of meaning:

Repetition and Reflection.

A story’s language of meaning:

Relex.

Means by which meaning is established within those patterns, creating that language:

Reference, Recontextualization, and Resolution.

Building Meaning

Part One: Never Let Roald Dahl Stop You from Understanding How Stories Build Meaning

Part Two: The First Four R’s of Story Meaning

In one of the footnotes, I mention hearing Dickens’s words as if spoken by a rapper, and that resulted in the title and that resulted in a search that brought me to Rap Battles: Mark Twain vs. Charles Dickens. I’ve got to tell you, though, this essay has nothing to do with rap.

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In a Parallel Universe, Dickens Lays Down the Beat

Parallelism is about comparison and contrast. Parallelism is about emphasis, balance, and rhythm. That explanation is its own example as one phrase parallels the others, because, fundamentally, parallelism is about structural repetition.

We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilized. We have books bound wholly in metals of unknown alloy, and books whose bindings are covered with thickset gems. We have books cased in perfumed woods shipped across the inconceivable gulf between creations—books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them.

The Book of the New Sun — Gene Wolfe

Literary parallelism uses similar structures within a sentence, paragraph, and ever larger passages to create patterns that aid in creating meaning and the aesthetics of readability. We have books here bound in hides… We have books bound wholly in metals… We have books cased in perfumed woods…

But I remembered how it felt to be a thief. It felt like living in a room without any windows. Then it felt like living in a room without any walls.

Find a Victim — Ross MacDonald

Parallelism in Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities is a classic, but Dickens was paid by the word. In the third chapter of the second book, that fact results in some of his least popular prose. You may disagree with the critics of this passage, but if we adopt their opinion, then this becomes an opportunity not only to study parallelism but also restraint. We can learn how variation in construction and complexity brings key passages into focus.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?

A Tale of Two Cities, Book 2, Chapter 3 — Charles Dickens

The paragraph overwhelms. In an attempt to lighten the reader’s burden, I take on the role of editor:

Within every great city at night, each darkly clustered house encloses secrets. The human creature is a profound mystery, and every beating heart holds in its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it: a locked book barely read and a treasure in deep water, now hidden beneath a silty gloom. My friend is dead…

I stop. Dickens is unhappy with my efforts, for he employed techniques which I’ve trimmed away. We need a readable paragraph, but one that retains that Dickensian style. For that, we must return to a technique used repeated throughout this paragraph and determine how best to make Dickens’s own work shine.

The passage has a number of parallel constructions.

No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved… No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water…

It was appointed… It was appointed….

In construction if not exact repetition, the paragraph began with another example: A wonderful fact to reflect upon… A solemn consideration…

The technique is sound, but the repeated use is too much. I suggest to Mr. Dickens that we focus on the structures important to his book-and-water metaphors.

Within every great city at night, each darkly clustered house encloses secrets. The human creature is a profound mystery, and every beating heart holds in its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore.

Allowed focus, the beauty of Dicken’s language reveals itself.

Dickens continues with another use of parallelism: my friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead…

Again, I suggest to him that it’s too much. Keep the focus on the metaphors, and grant us something different here: my friend, my neighbour, the darling of my soul is dead…

This simplicity gives the reader’s mind an opportunity to transition and prepare for the complex thought to come:

My friend, my neighbour, the darling of my soul is dead; the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret was always in that individuality, and I shall carry it in mine to my life’s end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?

Reality Check

This is an exercise in technique and restraint. I may never improve upon the master’s writing,1 but its beauty was lost to me an an inscrutable paragraph. Any technique can become too much, and here we had four examples of parallelism in a row, of which we’ve kept two, allowing the mind to understand what we’ve deemed important.

Dickens loved parallelism, and while we’ve seen the failure of excess, there are famous examples of its success. We remember the opening sentence / paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities because of its parallel structures (which imply an equality between statements) and its content (which are polar opposites). The power is undeniable.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Forms of Parallelism

The opening of Two Cities focuses on a form of parallelism known as anaphora, in which the beginning of a phrase is repeated, but there are also examples of epistrophe2 where the ending of a phrase is repeated. The dual examples exist in it was the best of times, it was the worst of times and in we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.

However, parallelism exists outside of either of these forms, and in that sense becomes less a tool and more the fundamental fabric of good writing. We see it in the need for verb tenses to match when we are writing, typing, scribbling down our thoughts for others to read. Every teacher has encountered and despaired of non-parallel structures. They transform a potential readable text into something jarring, like potholes in a freshly paved street.

If the above image from Notes doesn’t display, it’s a dog pillow with writing that reads: bark, woof, wag, bone, fetch. As points out, either the list breaks parallel structure of that pillow is NSFW.

Other Forms of Repetition

Many ways exist for a writer to build with repetition, and the easiest to pull off is direct repetition with little to no synonyms involved. Such a repetition is loud and may be used alone in concise language where is can have the stage to itself. We see this with a passage from Faulkner:

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.

The Sound and The Fury — William Faulkner

Equivalent repetition is softer when successful. In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf presents us with a cascade of ideas around a shared theme, intermixed with and transitioning into direct repetition.

…her old emotion…cold with excitement…a kind of ecstasy…the old feeling…and feeling as…That was her feeling—Othello’s feeling, and she felt it…as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it…

No, the words meant absolutely nothing to her now. She could not even get an echo of her old emotion. But she could remember going cold with excitement, and doing her hair in a kind of ecstasy (now the old feeling began to come back to her, as she took out her hairpins, laid them on the dressing-table, began to do her hair), with the rooks flaunting up and down in the pink evening light, and dressing, and going downstairs, and feeling as she crossed the hall “if it were now to die ‘twere now to be most happy.” That was her feeling—Othello’s feeling, and she felt it, she was convinced, as strongly as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it, all because she was coming down to dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seton!

Mrs. Dalloway — Virginia Woolf

But all techniques can be overdone, and we see equivalent repetition stretched beyond breaking in a paragraph from that overly maligned young-adult novel about vampires.

He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare. His glistening, pale lavender lids were shut, though of course he didn’t sleep. A perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal.

Twilight by Stephanie Meyer

I’ve written about this passage before and for the same reason: incandescent; scintillating; glistening; glittering. As we compare Woolf and Meyer, I’m challenged to understand why one works and the other doesn’t, and I’ll suggest the difference is variation. Meyer’s paragraph describes a character and uses equivalent adjectives to do it, and that gives us nothing else to focus on but the many, many ways his skin can be said to sparkle. Woolf gives us more, both with the depth of ideas conveyed in repetition but also in the breadth of style on display. Variation in sentence structure, in types of repetition, and in thought, all leading to the paragraph’s climactic idea.

I once asked how famous authors might have written this paragraph of Meyer’s. That essay has been behind a paywall for over a year, but I’ve made it free for those of you who wish read it. One author I didn’t include was Dickens, and I’ll close with how his love for parallelism might inspire a rewrite of Twilight.

He lay perfectly still in the grass. He lay perfectly still in the sun, his shirt open and his arms bare; glistening, pale lavender lids sleeplessly shut against the light, inscrutably shut against the rapture his perfect stature, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal, awakened within me.

— Thaddeus Thomas

How a Writer Conducts the Reader like a Symphony Orchestra

Timing in music is measured in the length of notes and rests. Poetry uses meter, but for prose there is cadence and the stressed syllable. Within this prosaic system, the sounds of the words and the way their utterance blends into one another (or doesn’t) adds the final subtlety, directing the reader’s ear as the story’s music plays.

Cadence

Consider the short poem Sometimes with One I Love by Walt Whitman, but without line breaks or non-standard spellings, presented as if it were not poetry but prose.

Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturned love, but now I think there is no unreturned love, the pay is certain one way or another. (I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not returned, yet out of that I have written these songs).

Whitman replaces a focus on meter and rhyme with techniques such as consonance, assonance, and cadence. Cadence is the rise and fall of intonation.

We are most aware of intonation in connection with punctuation. Questions and incomplete thoughts carry a rise in intonation. Uncertainty also carries that rise, which is why they teach you to end your statement with a falling intonation when speaking in public, to avoid conveying a lack of authority.

Statements, commands, and anything with a sense of completion has a falling intonation, as do the reporting questions (who, what, when, where, why, and how).

In longer sentences, the word before the comma is given a raised intonation, indicating that more is yet to come. Write those same lines in short sentences. Declarative. Ending in a period. You alter the intonation and with it, the implication. What is lost in musicality becomes authoritative and is often described as muscular and masculine.

Cadence structures the rhythm of a sentence one phrase at a time, but as we consider the words that make up each phrase, phonemes become important is supporting and frustrating that rhythm.

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Phonemes

The smallest unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another is a phoneme. When phonemes match, that’s consonance. We see phonemes at work when we hear the smooth flow of “laughter fails” and compare that with the distinct separation between words in “laugh falters,” where the reader must break the adjacent /f/-/f/ phonemes.

That /f/ sound is known as a fricative.

Fricatives, liquids, and plosives are forms of consonant sounds that create distinctly different results. Fricatives and liquids are drawn out, with fricatives having more restriction of the air flow. Liquids supply a flowing sound, while a fricative brings clarity to a word as well as an audible tension.

Examples of fricatives are the sounds /f/, /v/, /s/, and /z/, and liquids are sounds like /l/ and /r/. It helps to remember what each type of phoneme sounds like when you know their names begin examples of what they are. /f/ricative. /l/iquid.

The plosive is a sound made in an instant by cutting off and releasing airflow; the sound can’t be drawn out. Petty is made up of the voiceless plosives /p/ and /t/, while bad employs voiced plosives /b/ and /d/.

Plosives are explosive. While too many strung together can be jarring, their sharp sounds create emphasis.

A liquid’s role is to lend euphony to a sentence, but rhythm in fiction isn’t about limiting ourselves to the smoothest phonemes. Instead, we create patterns with verbal symphony complete with percussion, winds, and strings.

Stressed Syllables

If you’ve written any poetry, you’ll recall worrying over every syllable, both stressed and unstressed. In prose, the only concern is the stressed syllable. The timing between those stressed syllables remains constant, no matter how many unstressed syllables fit between. The result is that short, monosyllabic words slow the reading down, which can be used to the writer’s strategic advantage, while polysyllabic words and their unstressed syllables can aid a sentence’s sense of flow.

Whatever wonders befall man tonight…

Which one breaks men tonight…

The stressed syllables in the first line and the second fall into the same rhythm, which is made possible by the slight pauses you insert between the words of the second line.

In that fist line, the flow feels like it takes a beat just before befall. This isn’t an aspect of stressed syllables but of the impact of the plosive which doesn’t glide but has a singular beat that defines its sound. The /w/, by contrast, is called a semivowel or a glide. They’re consonants that act like vowels and glide words between the articulators that create consonant sounds (such as the tongue, lips, teeth, or the ridge just behind the upper front teeth).

The semivowel, like a liquid (or to some degree a fricative), aids in sonic flow by the variable length of its sound. Plosives create a staccato effect when grouped together.

Examples

He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce

The repeated /h/ is one example of consonance (generally alliteration, but not always, as in the case of unheeded and wildhearted). It’s known as a glottal fricative, meaning it passes air through the vocal cords without making a sound. The /ai/ in wild and life (the long “i” sound) is assonance, and the combination of the liquids and semivowels with a strong, easily pronounced vowel sound creates that sense of euphony.

On and on she went, across Piccadilly, and up Regent Street, ahead of him, her cloak, her gloves, her shoulders combining with the fringes and the laces and the feather boas in the windows to make the spirit of finery and whimsy which dwindled out of the shops on to the pavement, as the light of a lamp goes wavering at night over hedges in the darkness.

Mrs. Dalloway — Virginia Woolf

Here we see the use of assonance: spirit… whimsy… dwindled; and alliteration: light of a lamp. We see changes of pace through groupings of monosyllabic words followed by polysyllabic ones: her cloak, her gloves, her shoulders combining with the fringes and the laces and the feather boas in the windows…

Woolf transitions through these grouping by moving from a plosive that emphasizes the crisp pattern of the stressed syllables (cloak /c/) to the fricatives (gloves /g/ and shoulders /sh/). This then becomes the semivowels (windows, whimsy which, wavering) and liquids (light, lamp). It’s a transition into increasingly flowing sounds and then back out again with night (/n/: nasal consonant), hedges (/h/: glottal fricative) and darkness (/d/: plosive).

Flow Between Words and Phrases

Consider the phrase: a ball bearing rolls. Each word is distinct, but in the example a bad dear runs, in order to save the reading, we may sacrifice the words, voicing the line as a ba-dea-runs in our head. We hide this fact from ourselves by prolonging the sound of the /r/, like a car rolling through a stop sign. The plosives do not give us that option.

Compare the flow of ball bearing to the slower and distinct bad bearing. The /d/ and the /b/ are adjacent plosives which require a vocal pause and reset between the words. Ball ends with that liquid /l/ allows the reader to flow into the beginning plosive.

A bad deer runs is a series of adjacent phonemes. In a bad dog goes, that series is restricted to plosives, requiring multiple pauses and what may be misplaced mental effort. We generally want that reader’s mind engaged in the right places for the right purposes. However, that doesn’t mean we never use difficult phoneme constructions and turn them to our advantage.

Consider these phrases from the final paragraph of The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Once / there were brook trout / in the streams / in the mountains.

Notice how you’re forced to separate the ending and beginning plosives in brook trout. In-the-streams and in-the-mountains flow as if they were each one word, and that separates the phrases audibly from the distinct words: brook trout.

Variety is central to good writing. Too often, our phrases sound alike: she sat in her chair in the garden in the sun.

We can resolve this by removing phrases: she sat in the sunlit garden.

But that doesn’t mean we always want to resolve repetition by removing it. A repetitive cadence creates more tension the longer it’s held, and that tension is resolved in the change that follows it.

You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand.

McCarthy’s first sentence in this pair is made gentle through variation in its phrases and a scattering of two-syllable words. The next line feels like a completion, short and monosyllabic.

In its brevity, the fragment that follows hits those same beats, albeit through its stranded list of polysyllabic words.

Polished and muscular and torsional.

The pattern creates tension which is resolved through the change.

On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming.

Let’s return to our monotonous example and follow it with a change that relieves the tension: She sat in her chair in the garden in the sun / and bleached away the evil that seeped from her pores like the stench of her mother’s cigarettes.

No matter what your style, this concept of tension and release works. If your sentences feel dull and lifeless, if you’re struggling to develop style and nothing seems to help, this one technique can change everything.

Students look at great writers and ask why they get to break all the rules. Polished and muscular and torsional. How is that even a complete sentence? It’s not. By breaking the rules we can disrupt balance and create tension. Through cadence and word choice, we establish patterns that are then frustrated before finding their final fulfillment.

We feel the rhythm of cadence and stressed syllables, and through copious readings of well-written works, our internal sense of language overflows with rhythm until it spills into our writing. Our sentences do more than convey information. They conduct the reader, directing her pace and rhythm as if she were an orchestra performing the notes we’ve written upon the page.

— Thaddeus Thomas

P.S. — I’m personally of the conviction that we study these aspects of writing, allowing them to become part of the fabric our minds weave, but when it comes to the actual writing, we write. Through practice, the musician trains the motions of the muscle, but in the performance, muscle memory takes over. It’s the same here.

In the performance, we write.

I mentioned here the occasion that birthed this story, a trip to the art museum where, while perusing sculpture, the title came to me. Only, for the first 24 hours, that title was Fragments of a Story Saved from the Fire. The details of the story having nothing to do with what I saw that day, but it gave me a title and everything grew from there.

At a little over 3800 words, this is the longest of my stories written since my return.

I’ve called these stories horror-adjacent, which is silly. Horror is many things and embraces any number of uncomfortable emotions.

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Fragments of My Father Saved from the Fire

My father died at the proverbial stake, consumed by a non-proverbial fire. His home became his pyre. The ruined foundation resembled a grave marker, but in a cemetery, the grass would be trimmed. Flowers would be placed. Nothing awaited me but the solace of memories, and I stood at the end of the stoop, at the threshold of a door that no longer existed, and waited for something more.

Into that emptiness, I spoke his last known words, most certainly written for me:

My son, you are a composite of those who came before…

The shrill blast of the truck’s horn shook me. My truck. My father’s truck. Parked on the street, it had escaped the flames, becoming part of my inheritance. I glanced back to see my mother’s averted face, her eyes focused on the worn seats, unable to look upon the place we once called home and unwilling to look for peace in memories of my father. She wouldn’t have come if she’d known where I was going.

A minute, nothing more, I’d said. I never pass this way.

There’s no reason why you would.

She laid into the horn again. I didn’t move. Birds burst from tall patches of grass and filled the sky by the dozen. Dark in their groupings, they resembled demons fingerpainting with smoke the sigils of death. Mother’s voice cried out my name, attaching it to their sorcery. They trailed away, and I alone remained with my mother’s pleas.

She stopped when the neighbor’s screen door opened. Mrs. Winterbourne stepped out into that silence and beckoned for us to join her, a shawl of purple lace following every movement, flowing like a psychedelic after-image, her plump, perfect body illusory in its burst of color and grace.

“Y’all come see me a spell,” Mrs. Winterbourne said. “I have something for you.”

Mother shrunk out of sight.

Mutely, I waved, transmuted to that teen-aged self that had come of age enjoying the widow Winterbourne as she enjoyed her garden. Half-naked, Mother had said, and I, prone to a most literal exegesis, had spent hours watching and casting mental chicken bones, foretelling which half Mrs. Winterbourne might remove. In the end, she never presented those mysterious places to the light, but I had become a man in the waiting. I felt that manhood waiting for her now.

She was my mother’s age.

Mother glared at me as if she knew, but she knew nothing but that she would die and this moment was murdering her. “We’re going,” she hissed. “We’re going right now.”

I approached the truck.

I’d been sixteen when I last saw Mrs. Winterbourne, and in the years since, that scrawny, awkward boy had become a man: muscular, rugged, and easy on the eyes, if the word of a woman still meant anything in this man’s world. A grin bent cockeyed across my grief. I couldn’t help it. With a little effort, I could seduce Mrs. Winterbourne. Not that I would. But I could, and that pleased me. It pleased all the parts of me. I had my father’s good looks.

“Right now,” Mother hissed, spitting each word through a snarl that bared what should have been her fangs but were a hedgerow-perfect set of teeth.

“Mother,” I said.

The hiss became a growl.

“Mother,” I said.

She’d left my father and I when I was fourteen, two days before Christmas, and came back for me on New Year’s. This was always the way. Thoughtful, eventually. Afterthoughtful. Mother first. Sammy second. Whenever she complained about my own supposed selfishness, I confessed not to copying her greatest skill but to perfecting it.

“We’re going to say hello,” I said.

“You know what they must think of me?”

“I know what Mrs. Winterbourne will think of you if you don’t get out of that truck.”

Pouting, she opened the door. Dainty white shoes touched the ground. She looked at me from under lashes, hesitant and hoping for reprieve. I started across the yard. She followed. Mother was a slender socialite with little use for social niceties. She wore her little white dress high and tight, and in the right company, it never mattered what she said, not until the next morning, and by then she was ready to move on. Fuck the world, she’d always said, and the world obliged.

From the road, the house resembled many in town, a blend of Cape Cod and Craftsman with dormers peering fore and aft above tapered columns. Lawn occupied little of the yard, but Mrs. Winterbourne kept the various islands and pebble paths well maintained, and if the herb garden grew a bit wild and eccentric, it was secluded in the back. Few saw. None complained. As we drew near the porch, I heard music drifting through the screen door and the sound of footsteps as Mrs. Winterbourne prepared. Behind me, mother grunted and clutched my shirt to keep her balance. The grunt became a whine, the mewling of a shamed dog, but not for anything she had done. No, Mother’s shame was having been my father’s wife. After the fire, after the news, people assumed we’d known. We had to know. How could we not?

The bastard was a witch.

“What can we possibly say?” Mother said. “She’ll think we have answers. We don’t have answers. I don’t even understand the question.”

We didn’t need answers. We’d come to visit, to revel in old times and share our mutual confusion and amazement over relics found among the ashes. Our heads would shake at the scandals linked to my father by gossip and innuendo, like unsolved cases of animal sacrifice in the woods. No one had ever heard of these cases before, but we knew about them now. We’d share our grief and wonder, and we’d leave. Let the world observe our ignorance and wash us clean.

I held Mother’s hand, and we climbed the stairs. I knocked, Mrs. Winterbourne beckoned us inside, and Mother crossed the threshold. An involuntary gasp escaped her lips. I wondered how many had seen inside the house with its crystals and candles and whether they’d understood, before the fire, before the news. Mother tried to take a step back. I pushed her forward and closed the door behind us.

Mrs. Winterbourne’s house was everything the news had painted my father’s to be. Bundles of dried herbs hung above every window and door. Bone and feather crossed each other above the fireplace, held together by a dash of purple ribbon, seemingly as harmless as my grandmother’s potpourri.

Mrs. Winterbourne placed a silver tea set on a doily’d table, her smile wide and easy. “Make yourself at home. I honestly swear; it’s been a month of Sundays.”

Mother muttered, “Longer.”

She meant not long enough, and Mrs. Winterbourne certainly heard it that way.

“If I’d my druthers,” said Mrs. Winterbourne, “this moment would’ve come long ago, but come it has. Come it has.”

A raven hopped in from the kitchen and flew to its perch by the window. It roosted there, watching, appearing to think, seeming to judge. I thought of things to say, but said none of them. Mrs. Winterbourne poured the tea, not proper sweet tea but the English kind, with twigs swirling like detritus from a storm. It seemed fitting, considering our surroundings, and we each took the proffered cups.

“Samuel,” she said, “I want to tell you about your father.”

I took a sip of tea, a reflexive desire for normality, and stared blankly into the truth.

“Does this mean you’re a witch?” The word tasted funny on my tongue. Not the word. Not as a word. What tasted funny wasn’t the role but Mrs. Winterbourne in it. She was the mother-next-door, the one who shaped my taste in women. One taste threatened to sour another.

I had a girl waiting for me at home, and to see Mrs. Winterbourne was to see Emma’s future. If Winterbourne was a witch, it’d ruin me. The big brunette could no longer be my type, and what else was there? The slender socialite? Heaven and hell forbid.

“She’s not a witch,” Mother said.

I knew she wanted to add there’s no such thing, but there were such things. We knew that now. I waited for Mrs. Winterbourne to pounce, to pronounce the word Wiccan and denounce our denials and become judge and jury in her reverse witch trial. Instead, she ignored my mother, and in addressing me, ignored me as well, pushing forward on the path planned. I knew then she didn’t speak out of any love for Mother or me. She’d summoned us out of loyalty to my father.

“I loved him very much,” she said.

The cuckoo marked the hour’s passing.

“And he loved you,” she said.

I tried to make a crone of her beauty and failed. Grief and groin fought, grasping for the greater footing in this new world, but I remained beguiled by Mrs. Winterbourne, bewitching as ever.

“He wanted to tell you about us, but it never felt right,” she said.

Well won, old man. Well won. Even in death mastering and wrecking me.

“I learned to stay away when you were visiting. That was your time.”

She learned. She’d stayed away because she learned better than to be around when I came home. I understood that now, remembering the last time I’d seen her. My parents had been fighting again. All Mother had to do was drop me off for the weekend, but she was inside, yelling, threatening to take me home, to never let him see me again. I ran out back, and Mrs. Winterbourne was in her garden. Despite the fence between us, she knew I was there.

That you, Samuel? Come sit with me a spell.

At sixteen, I held no nostalgia for those days at my window, watching, only shame covered in a feigned forgetfulness. No desire drove me to her, only a greater need to get away. It was cold out, one of those early days of Autumn, but she didn’t invite me inside. We sat on the patio as a fire burned.

Never gets any better, does it? she said.

I didn’t answer, and it was good that anger held shut my mouth. I’d have told her to go to hell. She was right, though. They couldn’t be in the same room together. Couldn’t stay apart.

Nine years later, Mother put down her empty tea cup. “How long were you two seeing each other?”

“It was after you left,” Mrs. Winterbourne said. “About seventeen months after.”

“You recruited him?” Mother said. “Like a Jehovah’s Witness?”

Mrs. Winterbourne leveled all her attention on me. “Your father made that decision on his own. He saw my peace and wanted it for himself.”

I glanced at Mother, hearing the crude remark I knew she wanted to make: all the neighbors saw your piece. She didn’t say it though. With the burden of a great and painful weight, she didn’t say it, and the silence threatened to give her an aneurysm. I saw it in the twitching of her eye.

“Makes no matter,” Mother said. “You should tell the neighbors, though. Get them off our backs.”

“They’ve spoken to you?” Mrs Winterbourne said.

“No.”

“You’ll speak to them.”

“No.”

“In your years away,” Mrs. Winterbourne said, “perhaps your fire has cooled.”

In awkward silence, Mother stared at her tea.

“Forgive the expression,” Mrs. Winterbourne said.

Awkward or not, the point had merit. Time away from my father had done Mother good, mended some wounded aspect of her soul, and now I knew how that came to be, beginning with that cold afternoon on Mrs. Winterbourne’s patio.

She’d looked into my twitching eye, and with the whispered tone of a Sunday’s sermon highlight-reel, spoke truths I knew but never wanted to hear.

Your mother can’t be honest with herself, neither about what she wants nor who she is. Do you know what that does to a person?

No.

The light of reason stops guiding your actions, she said and tapped me on the chest. That’s when choice springs from here, from those canyons of your heart you can neither hear nor see. It’s where all the truth resides that your mind can’t handle.

So? I said, that and nothing more. It seemed enough. It seemed like nothing I said could ever be enough.

We’ll make your mother a gift, Mrs. Winterbourne said. But it would be best if she didn’t know it came from me.

I nodded and scooted a little closer to the fire. Mrs. Winterbourne excused herself, and when she returned from the kitchen, she carried a tiny burlap sack with a loose purple ribbon sewn into its neck. She picked a few herbs from the garden, added them to the sack, cinched it tight, and secured it with a bow.

Drop this inside your mother’s purse, she said. It’ll help calm her nerves.

The gift worked. My parents fought over the phone, but after that, whenever Mother drove to the house, she never went inside.

Now, I understood why.

Mrs. Winterbourne encouraged us to finish our tea. In unison, Mother and I raised our cups.

“Your father wanted to help you,” Mrs. Winterbourne said. “He was making you a present when he died. I retrieved what I could and rebuilt the rest. It’s ready for you, if you’re interested.”

“Is that what killed him?” I imagined dark sorcery over a burning pentagram.

“He smoked in bed. I’d warned him more times than I can count, but it didn’t do any good.”

I would have preferred sorcery.

“You weren’t with him?” Mother said.

“We were dating, not living together.”

“I’m interested,” I said.

Mother looked at me.

“It’s from Dad,” I said.

Mrs. Winterbourne stood, but I held out my hand to stop her.

“Why weren’t you living together?” I said. “Why didn’t you marry?”

Mrs. Winterbourne flashed sadness in the shape of a smile and gathered our empty cups. “Come with me. You’ll understand.”

The room felt suddenly crowded. The raven tilted its head with a personality I thought I recognized, and for a moment I thought it was my father, but it wasn’t my father.

Mrs. Winterbourne led us into the kitchen.

When I was twenty-three I’d noticed something odd about my father’s home. Beneath the obvious strangeness of Mrs. Winterbourne’s house, I saw it here, too. No, that’s not fair. It’s not true. Emma noticed it first, and I noticed it after she’d pointed it out.

I’d never brought many girls home, but I’d thought Emma was the one, the girl to keep until her looks gave out. I’d still thought so until just that moment, until I learned my father had fucked Mrs. Winterbourne, which was too much like him fucking my girl, and that wasn’t something I knew how to handle.

Mr. Fisher, Emma had said, you have the most extraordinary kitchen.

Call me Ishy, Father said.

Ishy. Emma grinned bigger than I’d ever seen, the first instance of Father provoking my jealousy, something I should have taken as an omen.

Emma pointed to the copper-finished, Bertazzoni proofing oven, and Father explained the delicate needs of yeast. She gushed over the high-end dehydrator, and he lectured on extractions and preservation. I’d never given any thought to the changes in my father’s kitchen. Lonely men liked lonely things. Emma saw something miraculous and wild.

I’m glad to see you take an interest, Father said. Sammy’s always been a little lost in the kitchen.

Most men are, she said.

Once upon a time. These days, it’s a pretense.

He’d said it in good humor, but the dig angered me. Real men didn’t care about kitchens and neither would he, if he’d been able to keep my mother, but now I understood the source of his interest. He’d copied every aspect from Mrs. Winterbourne’s kitchen, lacking only the overtly pagan aesthetic. Maybe he imitated that, too, on days I didn’t visit.

“The wrongs of one life inhibit the next,” Mrs. Winterbourne said.

Mother rolled her eyes.

“Your father couldn’t begin a new marriage until he’d settled the sins of the old,” Mrs. Winterbourne said.

Mother’s eyes stopped rolling.

“And then came the cancer,” Mrs. Winterbourne said.

We ceased to breathe, and I remembered how thin he’d been the last time we were together. He didn’t explain. I didn’t ask. Mostly, I bitched about wanting to go out, but he was tired. I told him he was too young to be this old.

Tell me about Emma, he’d said.

I stared out the back window as if something wonderful might spring up from the grass and deliver me.

We’ve got a few years left in us.

Sammy.

No more lectures, I said.

She deserves better.

She’s free to do as she pleases. So am I.

He sat in the gloom, away from the light that streamed through the windows, and faced a dark television. I saw nothing more to his life than that, a dog lingering for crumbs when life’s meal was gone.

Life’s short, he said. Fill it with something good.

Good’s all there is.

Pleasure and good aren’t the same thing.

At least, that’s what I think he meant to say. His voice trailed off. I might have asked then if there was something wrong, but the boredom had grown thick and oppressive. The whole world beckoned, and he’d trapped me in that stuffy house, a prisoner to his early old age. I told him I had to go and didn’t wait for an answer.

I could have done so much more.

Mrs. Winterbourn set a bowl on the kitchen island. “That’s when he began work on this.”

I recognized it from the paper, or one very much like it. The news had made a fuss about a ceremonial dagger and melted glass fused with a tiny bird carcass, but none of it would have meant much if they hadn’t found what they called an incantation bowl, the words of its spell carved along the interior, spiraling from rim to well.

“I see the recognition in your eyes,” she said. “You know the bowl. You’ve read the transcript of its spell.”

I had. The entire town had.

With a glass stirring rod, Mrs. Winterbourne scraped the twigs from my cup into the bowl.

“As part of your father’s gift, you’ll need to recite it now.” From a cabinet, she pulled a glass orb with the remains of a cardinal trapped inside, as if resting.

“Dear God,” Mother muttered.

“I didn’t kill the bird.” Mrs. Winterbourne placed the orb inside the bowl, a perfect fit. “Do you remember the words of the spell?”

I shook my head, every movement a lie.

From the refrigerator, Mrs. Winterbourne removed an amber glass bottle and poured a black-red liquid that covered the orb and pooled along the rim.

“Dragon’s blood,” she said. “Tree resin mixed with alcohol. When the alcohol dries, it leaves a hard, red finish, sealing together the orb and bowl. You have until then to speak your father’s spell.”

“I don’t remember,” I said.

“I believe you do.”

Mother grabbed my arm. “I don’t trust her. Not a word of it. Not about your father. Not about him having cancer. Not about that bird.”

“I didn’t kill the bird,” Mrs. Winterbourne said. “Neither did Ishy when he made his. We wait. It’s part of the ritual. We wait until we find one felled naturally.”

“We know what you really do,” Mother said. “Everybody knows.”

“Everybody? You mean those people who judge you by what they’ve read? Are they the everybody who knows?”

Mother didn’t answer.

“It’s the way of the world to blame the powerless. If a child goes missing or a critter dies, blame those who can’t defend themselves. Anything done that needs hiding, blame it on the elderly; blame it on the woman; blame it on the witch. That’s a memory born into every girl’s blood.”

Mother’s voice softened. “I still don’t trust you.”

“Those old ways keep a man from facing the culprit at home.” Mrs. Winterbourne looked at me. “You’re a master of those old ways, aren’t you, Samuel? A vein of cruelty runs through your ore, but it can be made gold. You’ll have to choose, but make it quick. Alcohol don’t take long to dry.”

She hadn’t explained my father’s gift, but from the words of the spell, I understood well enough. Everyone should have but hadn’t. That was clear from the rage. The town had welcomed his message about family as if it were the end of everything good and godly.

My son, you are a composite of those who came before, a present that retains the past, a vessel that holds the blood once spilled, now emptied for blood’s trespass.

#

The journey back felt strange, and once, I lost my way. Mother complained and didn’t stop complaining until I parked outside her house, and then she didn’t speak and didn’t move. She breathed and shuddered with the effort of breathing.

“We shouldn’t have gone back,” she said when I refused to fill the silence. “I don’t belong there.”

“I know.”

She managed a smile and patted my leg. “You gonna be okay?”

I shrugged, which was the most honest answer I could manage, and she climbed out of the truck and shut her front door, and I was alone. Only, I didn’t feel alone. I felt like I’d been gone, not for a few hours but gone far away for very long.

My apartment had a keypad. I knocked. Emma let me in.

I confessed to a forgotten code, but in truth the whole system caught me by surprise, as if my own home were something distant and crudely remembered, like fragments from a dream. The more I fought to center myself, the more I felt like a wrong that couldn’t be made right.

I told Emma she deserved something more and left, taking little with me. None of it belonged to me. I belonged to none of it. Except the truck. I took the truck, and the road passed beneath me without purpose or direction. My phone rang. The screen read Emma. I didn’t answer.

Mrs. Winterbourne’s house stood silhouetted against the awakening day. A murmuration of starlings rose into the dawn, painting sigils of life, and I wept. When the sky again hung empty and blue, I dried my eyes and left the truck, and Mrs. Winterbourne opened her door like she’d been waiting all this time, my angel at the threshold.

“You’re home now,” she said and held me and cried.

Some part of me thought this strange, too, but such a thought was built on lies. For weeks, I’d sat with the spell, those words, and their meaning. Given my proclivity for a literal exegesis, I knew. I had to have known. How could I not?

— Thaddeus Thomas

He’s Brian Scalabrine, AKA the White Mamba, and I’ve been thinking about that fan psychology a good deal lately. On the courts of Substack, we talk a lot of smack, but our game might not live up to our claims.

Last year I wrote a series on advanced writing techniques and had begun the work on turning that into book form. That work stopped when I needed to step away, but I’m once again pressing forward. Over the next several months, I’ll post updated articles to help transform those ideas into something more book ready, but I believe there’s more to be done.

Fan psychology can lull us into contentment. It makes us believe the only thing holding us back is an inept industry. Writers get lazy. One reader came to me after he’d read an article mocking “the try-hards.” It claimed talent poured out of you like piss from a cow, or it didn’t.1 There’s was no point in trying to be better.

Whoever wrote that nonsense had succumbed to fan psychology. He thought he could beat Scalabrine, maybe even LeBron himself. An honest industry would have recognized his talents by now.

Don’t get me wrong. The industry is broken, but that’s something we can’t fix. What we can do is become better writers.

Allow me to strip away any false modesty and be real. I consider my breakout story, The Sphinx and Ernest Hemingway, to be art. It was published under my real name in 2006 in the second issue of Fantasy Magazine, and it would haunt me for the next decade as I struggled to repeat what I’d captured in that magical moment.

The story came within a hair’s breadth of being accepted by my dream publication, but in the years that followed, I realized that if the story I couldn’t live up to didn’t make it… what chance did I have? Frustrated and disgusted, I pulled my crime novel from a friend’s publishing house and walked away.

Only, walking away didn’t work. I kept writing, even if I’d told myself I’d given up on publication. Truth was, I was lying to myself. There were real reasons I’d walked away. First of all, the book wasn’t good enough. That’s why I pulled it. Second, I was seeing less stories published because I insisted on pursuing my own weird ideas instead of satisfying an audience, and finally, I could write well but not consistently well.

God bless who helped with my attempts a decade ago and who read some of the worst lines I’ve ever penned to paper. Mind you, this was a decade after I’d published Sphinx, and I still couldn’t find my footing.

Check out her Substack. Read her books. She’s the real deal. She’s done it all, including publishing with the big houses.

Credit in inspiring my second life as a writer also goes to who I first met about the same time. His literary work showed me what flow really is. His lines are like a river, taking me along wherever they may lead.

Eventually I came here and started the series on advanced writing techniques, and the experience has taken me to a new level. Still, there’s more to be done.

The danger in comparing ourselves against ourselves, boosting our egos (or bruising them) against this narrow selection, is that the real barrier we must break is somewhere beyond.

The best ballplayers in the neighborhood can’t stand toe-to-toe with Brian Scalabrine. Yet, for me, the only acceptable goal is to out-write the professionals. If that’s your goal, too, I’ll share what I gather along the way, and together, we’ll kick literary ass.

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The Biggest Improvement in my Consistency Came from this:

After mentioning the importance of subjective and objective writing in my last essay, I’ve felt compelled to write about the subject, but anything I say here will be raw and fresh. These are ongoing lessons shared in the heat of the writer’s battle, not pondered upon from the safety of years passed.

I’ve often quoted a paragraph Hemingway wrote about a downhill skier,2 and it’s largely objective writing and yet has a lovely flow to it. That counter example will stand in sharp contrast to this claim: subjective writing is the key to achieving flow in your writing. Through the various sentence structures and techniques I’ve discussed in my essays, we can achieve rhythm and flow anywhere, but it’s true that subjective writing makes it easier as it more readily opens itself up to sentence-extending techniques.

Many writers trip themselves up by limiting themselves to objective reporting of the story (a camera’s view of what’s happening), interspersed with the characters direct thoughts. The resulting reading experience can be jarring.

I’m a fan of objective writing and believe many writers use too little of it. It helps ground us in place and action. Interiority can be hinted at in ways that become profound when the reader is able to connect the dots and draw their own conclusions. That being said, one of my stumbling blocks was the ill-conceived idea that objective writing was better writing.

Then, as I realized the error of that thinking, I over-complicated my approach to a character’s interior life and shattered the flow of my writing. I promise you. It doesn’t have to be that complicated.

Let me stop here and introduce you to a Youtube video because it contains some points I want to address:3

The key points:

• Don’t use emotion words (angry, sad, happy) to tell us what your POV character is feeling. They’re fine when your POV character is considering the emotional state of another character

• Don’t us bodily sensations to tell us what a character is feeling. This one is huge. It goes against so much of the advice we get, and she’s absolutely right.

• Avoid writing as if body parts have a will of their own unless that’s your actual point.

That second point was screaming in the back of my mind and demanding to be shared. Of course, this is a list of what not to do, but while sweaty palms aren’t a great way to write about fear, there are other options. One writing-advice Youtuber who recommends the sweaty-palms technique likes to tell us to get up inside our character’s body. Instead, get up inside your character’s mind. Use subjective writing to show us her thoughts and feelings.

Objective, camera-view writing and a character’s direct thoughts are extreme ends of a spectrum of possibilities in what’s known as narrative distance, and your writing is free to move along that spectrum. We will each have areas where we feel more comfortable, from which our writing will reach out into strange territories and return to safety. That point of comfort and the dance outward will help give our style a flavor that is uniquely our own, but the entire spectrum remains available to each of us.

The jarring sensation we feel from having direct thoughts dropped inside an objective paragraph comes from a lack of transition through degrees of narrative distance. The writer’s camera doesn’t have to be locked in place nor is the mind beyond its reach. We’re free to roam, and if done well, we have no need to explain ourselves when that distance shifts.

The spectrum is all about the degree to which the character’s perceptions and emotions flavor the writing. The stronger the flavor, the more we can readily use the various techniques available to us.

For more on narrative distance, I suggest this article by .

Falden's Forge

The Most Important Narrative Tool No One Told You About

There’s one important part of narrative that is almost completely overlooked, a tool for crafting a story that seemingly no one has heard about…

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2 years ago · 355 likes · 78 comments · Eric Falden

To explore my work on prose line theory, begin here:

Together, let’s move beyond fan psychology and grow as writers.

— Thaddeus Thomas

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In the beginning, new writers rebel against this process. They fear that stripping away amateurish habits will make their writing sound like everyone else’s. Their writing feels unique because they don’t see anything else like it on the store shelves. Unfortunately, those habits make their work read like all the others in the slush pile. Ripping away bad habits is a necessary process of tearing down our writing to this shared language and then finding ourselves anew within it.

That finding ourselves is largely the process of learning the various tools available to us, but today, I want to address something different. I want to talk about the idiosyncratic nature of your style.

When William Faulkner lambasted the idea of pursuing a style, I think this is what he meant. He wasn’t belittling writers for learning how to write better, he was mocking them for trying to figure out what would be their unique signature. I first began to appreciate how correct he was as I heard Cormac McCarthy and Charlie Kaufman talk about their own writing. It’s less obvious with David Lynch, but through them, I understood Lynch better as well.

I mention these three because they’re all favorites of mine and I longed to be more like them. In the early 90’s, it seemed every TV show and movie was aping the style of either David Lynch or Quentin Tarantino. None captured the magic and were quickly forgotten, but even with all that evidence before us, many of us longed to be like our favorite novelists or screenwriters. Only the original writers could convince me I needed to find my own path.

Kaufman has spoken on the subject, but it was Cormac McCarthy’s history in developing his minimal use of punctuation that really struck home.

The first time I ever checked out a book by McCarthy, the librarian commented that she had tried to read his stuff but couldn’t get past his lack of punctuation, and it does take some getting used to. For McCarthy, however, he thought it made the prose clearer. It began when someone charged him with rewriting something to make it easier for them to read. McCarthy stripped away much of what he considered to be the unnecessary punctuation, and it worked. That experience birthed it all.

McCarthy wasn’t trying to distinguish himself from other writers. He was pursuing the path he thought led to greater clarity. Kaufman isn’t trying to be avant-garde. He has a particular type of story to tell, and he’s looking for the best way to tell it. Lynch isn’t trying to give homespun Americana a weird twist; down to his soul, that’s simply who Lynch is.

Each of these storytellers is a unique voice, but they were simply being true to themselves and telling a story as clearly as they could. That holding true to themselves wasn’t about clinging to amateurish habits. They learned the language of their medium but held to their convictions about how each story should be told.

I walked away from this with my mantra: clarity with conviction.

As I work on my fourth short story for 2026, I see the choices I make that aren’t grammatically required but feel right and necessary to me. If the patterns of my writing were different, I might have made other choices, but I have emerged with two new rules, strictly for myself, that I believe conform to this idea of clarity with conviction.

The choices are similar in nature. First, I write “and” instead of “but” unless the context absolutely demands I do otherwise. Second, my character tags use “said” instead of “asked” unless context demands otherwise. My characters say most questions. In both cases, the words fade into the unseen parts of the sentences, whereas the change to a but or an asked demands too much attention for itself. My choices allow the focus to be elsewhere while sustaining the rhythms of repetition that are important to my work.

Whether I’m right or wrong is irrelevant. You don’t have to agree with me. That librarian certainly didn’t think McCarthy’s use of punctuation increased clarity. In addition, if I didn’t point these choices out, I suspect most readers wouldn’t notice. It’s not a stylistic signature in the sense of some expert noting how Thomas does this or that. It’s a personal conviction about what brings clarity to the flow and meaning of my writing.

The intent is clarity with conviction.

Is it a big deal? No. Probably the most important improvement in my writing in recent years has been a better intuitive understanding of subjective writing, writing tinted with the opinions and judgments of the POV character, as opposed to objective writing that presents events without opinion. I believe objective writing has an important role to play, but as I unlearned some bad teachings about subjective writing, the consistency of my writing improved. Maybe I should write about that soon, but my point in this context is that clarity with conviction isn’t a back door to being more like our favorite authors.

These can be small choices, but the goal is to tell a story clearly without chaining ourselves a committee’s approval about what clarity means.

— Thaddeus Thomas

Suggested Reading: Never Let Roald Dahl Keep You from Understanding How Stories Build Meaning

Required Reading: One Star Review by Nick Winney

Spoilers: As Good As It Gets and Toy Story

This is part 2 of my exploration of meaning, but part 1 (Never Let Roald Dahl…) isn’t necessary to understand today’s essay. However, Nick Winney has agreed to our using “One Star Review” as an editorial case study for how we can put meat on beautiful bones. Reading his story first is highly recommended.

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Meaning has Six Rs

Here are the first four:

• Repetition

• Reflection

• Recontextualization

• Resolution

In the first essay, I discussed a story’s “punch line” (recontexualization) and mentioned themes and motifs (both of which are aspects of repetition and reflection). Today, we’ll add resolution, by which I usually mean the denouement.

Denouement has at least two meanings, the modern and the classical. Here, I mean the modern meaning, the post-climax story wrap-up. In the classical sense, the denouement is the entire last act.

If you’ve finished a story and just want it to have more weight, begin by reviewing the resolution.

As Good As It Gets

Let’s look at the final moments of As Good As It Gets (screenplay by Mark Andrus and James L. Brooks).

Carol is on the verge of walking away from her strange, budding relationship with Melvin, when he stops her by saying: “Hey, I’ve got a compliment for you.”

She’s still hesitant, but he breaks into his speech about how he’s the one who sees how wonderful she is. They kiss. It’s a failure, but Melvin says, “I know I can do better.” They kiss again, and this time, it shows promise.

They walk off together and discover a bakery is open. Melvin backs up for the man sweeping the entrance and in doing so, steps on a sidewalk crack, something he’s spent the entire movie avoiding. Melvin notices the moment, and walks into the bakery with Carol.

That’s the resolution. So, how does it help create meaning?

The most obvious part is the speech which keys into Carol’s need to be appreciated, but it’s one, less-subtle part of the whole. Negotiation and persuasion gurus tells us that the most powerful persuasion technique is to make the other person think the idea is their own. You present two pieces of information and allow them to make the connection.

The movie begins doing this when Melvin says, “I have a compliment for you.” This reflects an earlier scene where Melvin has to rescue his dinner with Carol after accidentally insulting her. She demands a compliment, and if it’s not good enough, she’s leaving. He goes into to a long monologue about how he hates medication but because of her, he started taking his pills.

At first, she doesn’t understand, but he explains: “You make me want to be a better man.”

This is echoed again after the first attempt at a kiss, when he says: “I know I can do better.” It comes up for a final time when he realizes he’s stepped on a crack, and he’s okay.

She needs someone who appreciates her. He needs someone who inspires him to be better. That is the core of the story’s meaning, and exactly how we phrase that meaning will depend on which of the story’s themes resonate the most with us.

• Improvement is a series of small steps, not an instant transformation.

• We need relationships that bring out the best in us.

• We can overcome selfishness and learn to put other people first.

For another quick example, the end of Toy Story has Woody say, “Buzz! You’re flying!” And Buzz replies, “This isn’t flying; this is falling with style.” It’s a repetition of Woody’s line from the beginning of the movie, and it shows how Woody now believes in (respects and loves) Buzz and how Buzz now embraces his role as a toy. It’s not just a random call back but a repetition central to the story’s meaning.

This aspect of storytelling is so crucial that if you change the resolution, you change the meaning. Carol and Melvin’s actions at the final uncertain moment in their relationship tell us how to view all that’s come before. If Buzz replied to Woody that he could fly all along, that they can all be more than a child’s play thing—the entire movie changes.

If we’re editing to put meat on a story’s bones, it only makes sense to start at the end. We do that by asking ourselves the right questions:

• Does the story mean anything in its present state?

• If it has meaning, is it a meaning we want and could it be made stronger?

• Is there a better meaning we’d like to build from what we’ve written?

Out answers will inspire our work: reflecting meaningful moments. Meaning is made through repetition.

Many times, we’ll only now fully understand our story and what we hope to say, and that probably means rewriting earlier material.

One Star Review

Nick Winney’s story One Star Review is a delight. It’s well written, moves fast, and it’s fun. That’s enough. The end.

I had the nerve to reach out to him because I found the story through a Note where he’d claimed it had been turned down for not having enough story, and I thought that was nonsense. It has plenty of story. It sounds like what they needed was a little more meat on those beautiful bones—some meaning to give the tale coherence and weight.

That never happened, however. The “not enough story” line was Nick’s own, but if I wanted to dissect the story, he was all for it.

I’ve done this a few times before, but this one is different. I’ve recently decided that our writing needs clarity with conviction. The conviction is about being true to ourselves and writing our story in the style we think serves the story best. Given that context, our next job is to tell the story as clearly as we can. Nick does that.

I’m not giving a line editorial today. I only want to consider how we might approach the story if we wanted to build more weight… depth… meaning.

The Story’s Current Meaning

For me, these lines are important to understanding the character:

Henderson, with his wanky Audi. Such a dickhead. Barely able to string a sentence together, let alone argue a point. These people can vote. These people get to run franchises and people like me, who can make them look like the clueless twats that they are, even after a dozen shots? We get to work in their shit sandwich shops for minimum rate on zero hours contracts. Something is going wrong with the world.

Along with Debs placating words meant to ease the pain of the termination:

“Don’t take it out on me; I’ve let you off loads of times. You’ll get a job somewhere else easy. You’re too smart for sandwich prep anyway, you can do better than…than… this.”

Is Nick really as smart as he thinks he is? Probably not, but he thinks he’s better than others and the world is cheating his greatness and rewarding mediocrity. In his mind, he’s absolutely justified.

The Current Resolution

It was glorious chaos. I took a photo.

When I got home, I went online and left a review: “One Star - Not enough pigeons.” And posted my photo.

Fresha social media replied. It was probably Debs. “The person that left this review is a former employee who maliciously attracted pigeons into our shop on market street. We would like to apologise for any inconvenience to our wonderful customers while we cleaned the shop.”

I had another idea.

After week of it, they called the police. “It’s a free country,” I said, dropping the whole sack of grain at the door and retreating to a safe distance.

A week? These people are saints.

Building Meaning

As we look for connections to build upon, the segments I highlighted under Current Meaning are important, but there may be others we want to consider. Personally, I’m fond of:

“They say its good luck, getting shit on by a bird,” I said “but the birds will tell you it takes years of practice.”

That line’s humor hides its thematic resonance. Nick believes Henderson arrived at his position by unmerited luck, but I’m sure Henderson would tell us it took years of hard work. There’s a great deal in common between people and pigeons.

We could focus on echoing the idea that some people get all the luck, and Nick is just giving them more—enough more to potentially drive them out business. By proxy, it’s Nick who’s shitting all over them.

I hope you can see I’m not trying to change the story, only highlight aspects to emphasize their importance. Maybe Nick’s story doesn’t need it, but this is the same process I just went through with my own.

Rewriting Earlier Material

Do we not change anything? I don’t want to because Nick’s story reads so well, but let’s assume we haven’t a choice. There’s pigeon being held to our heads. We have to make a change. In that case, I’d look here:

I rolled my eyes and sighed. Looking up to the exposed pipework of the ceiling, dusty spider webs hung down, the aircon wafting them gently in the direction of the door.

These are perfectly fine lines, except our space is limited. I know they’re in the prep room, but I want a view of salad bar before it’s introduced in the climax. If we’re talking about the exposed pipework, I want there to have been a time when a bird flew into the restaurant and used those pipes to roost. It would foreshadow events to come and build a greater cohesion.

What we need, though, is to use one of our reflected passages to hide a kernel of the true meaning, at least what the story means to us.

For that, I’m looking to this passage:

“Was it the Christmas lunch thing? Was it that?” Debs looked even more uncomfortable.

“It’s that isn’t it.” Debs looked away and shifted on her feet. I rolled my eyes and sighed. Looking up to the exposed pipework of the ceiling, dusty spider webs hung down, the aircon wafting them gently in the direction of the door.

“That’s what you were talking about the other day when he came in, isn’t it. He told you to sack me, first chance you got, and this is it isn’t it.”

I know what I want Debs to say, but she’s not going to tell Nick that he can’t shit on people and get away with it. She’s not even going to admit the Christmas party had anything to do with Nick getting fired, but we can put all that in Nick’s mind. He’s heard it before. People get embarrassed when they’re bettered and talk like you’ve shit all over them, a bunch of mindless fools self-deceived into believing they’ve earned what luck has thrust upon them. In the end, Nick’s always the one getting crapped on.

In his mind, anyway.

What this accomplishes is tying the pigeon poop to a line about self-deception, which has been Nick’s problem all along.

The meaning becomes something like: people can look like lucky fools, that we’re the smart ones working hard for no reward, but judging others is a self deception that makes us the fool.

A Note on Recontextualization

In One Star Review, the punch line is Nick’s use of the pigeons to get revenge. It’s the engine of meaning for the story because it takes all of his pain and turns it into violence against those who don’t deserve it. It cements Nick as the villain, not the hero, of the tale.

With the story written and that climax in place, we look to the resolution to interpret what just happened. Nick doesn’t learn. In fact, he escalates his behavior while the story’s points of reflection highlight thematic elements, reminding us how it all ties together.

This Essay’s Resolution

Roald Dahl often didn’t do this kind of work in his adult stories, and he’s a beloved author. It’s not required. However, if you want to create more meaning in your work, try building on the work of your climax* by connecting thematic points through reflection and repetition and then pulling it all together in the resolution.

— Thaddeus Thomas

*That’s assuming your climax is your recontextualization point. It doesn’t have to be.

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My problem wasn’t the joke structure but rather my judgment of his stories as ending with a gotcha and little more. I needed an example that would teach me what was really happening and show me the potential for creating meaning in our stories. I found that example in “Man from the South.”

For years, I remembered the story as being by Stephen King, most likely confusing it with “Quitter’s Inc.” (from both the book Night Shift and the film Cat’s Eye). In the Roald Dahl story (first published as “Collector’s Item”), a man from South Africa bets his Cadillac against a stranger’s pinky that his lighter won’t light ten times in a row. That story was an episode in both the original Alfred Hitchcock Presents and the 1980’s revival. In 1979, it was an episode of Tales of the Unexpected, and in 1995, it was Quentin Tarantino’s segment for the movie, Four Rooms (with the title changed to A Man from Hollywood). Chances are, you’re familiar with it in some form.

If not, consider this a spoiler warning for both that story and Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace”.

“Man from the South” doesn’t have a moral; it’s not teaching you a lesson. Even so, you come away from the story with the understanding that people will wager something that isn’t even theirs against your deep and true loss.

Time after time, the lighter refuses to fail, but on the last attempt, our hero nearly loses his pinky. The man, however, never had anything to wager. Seeing his addiction, his wife had gambled against him, time and time again, until she owned everything he ever possessed. That car is hers, not his to gamble away against some unsuspecting fool.

She reveals the cost: most of her fingers are gone.

As the main character is tricked, so is the reader, and this provides for both the surprise revelation and the feeling of weight that I don’t get from most of his stories.

I don’t believe a reader needs to understand what the meaning is, although it’s wonderful if they do. They should, however, feel like the story has substance. I want the reader to believe that if they spent time ruminating over what they’d read, they’d find the meat. That’s important, even if they never make the effort. It makes the reader’s investment of time feel worthwhile.

Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” reminds me of Dahl’s stories. In it, a woman borrows a diamond necklace but loses it. For the next decade, she and her husband work in poverty until they can repay the loss, only to learn the original was a fake. It may be de Maupassant’s most famous work. Like Dahl or O.Henry, it obviously fits that story-as-joke format.

My personal favorite of his stories isn’t so obvious, but even so, the punch line is there.

Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif“ (or “Ball of Fat”) follows the Edgar Alan Poe tradition of starting slowly and ending strong, and while I now see its ending as a punch line, at the time, it felt like a gut punch. The emotional impact is unforgettable and its theme of hypocritical righteousness has stuck with me and challenged me throughout my life. That’s all I’ll say about the story’s content, because I hope you’ll read it, but I dream of having that kind of impact with my own writing.

That resonance happens not despite the way a story works like a joke but because of it.

I was a pastor for twenty years and was often forced to watch Christian movies. I hated it. With all the hours I spent studying scripture, I didn’t need someone’s story to force feed meaning to me. Fiction isn’t about lectures but themes, motifs and, for lack of a better term, punch lines.

I hesitate to use the word “twist” because we have certain ideas of what a twist ending is, but there are subtle ways a story can recontextualize itself. However bold or subtle it may be, the punch line creates meaning. In “The Necklace,” the story was about personal sacrifice to make right a wrong, but the ending refocused the meaning on the vanity that keeps us from openly addressing our failures.

And if the reader misunderstands your meaning? Let them. Your story isn’t a sermon. They don’t have to get the “right” meaning or even be able to put it into words. If they feel it, that’s enough. For some, it might be a life-changing moment, but we have no control over that. We absolutely shouldn’t force it. Let meaning be there for the reader to experience on their terms, to whatever degree.

The punch line itself isn’t enough. The story that leads up to it builds both the context and the capacity for recontextualization, and the study of literary techniques is more than just the beauty of a sentence. Those choices increase our capacity to create meaning without resorting to sermons and lectures. The examination of those choices is what the Literary Salon is all about.

— Thaddeus Thomas

The trouble was that I was “eavesdropping” on people who had already done that foundation work. Their focus was on what they needed, not what I needed, and I was too ignorant to know the difference.

We need to find that advice that applies to us where we are.

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Two: I’m a fan of the one-panel comic, and a key to their success is the artwork tells a story that is then reinterpreted by the writing underneath. If the comic is just a talking head saying something funny, it surrenders much of its power.

If we squint hard enough to apply this to fiction writing, it could be interpreted different ways. It could be action within the mise-en-scène that reinterprets and is reinterpreted by the dialogue. It could be the narrative voice set against the voices of the characters. However we apply it, a contrast in narrative elements can reveal things to the reader that need never be directly addressed.

Three: I’m a tall, fat, middle-aged man, but I’m trying to get back in shape. As I wade into the proverbial shallow-end of working with weights, I feel my muscles wanting to lift. If I have a quiet moment, my body is eager for the next dumbbell.

I’m experiencing my body differently, but none of that is visible. I look the same, and while pondering that phenomenon, something struck me.

I didn’t get fat by focusing on the end result. I got fat because I enjoyed the process of getting fat. If I want to get back into shape, I need to focus on enjoying the process. Do that, and the results will take care of themselves.

The greatest advice we can give ourselves:

Enjoy.

—Thaddeus Thomas

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Day of the Comeback Writer

I don’t write anymore, or at least, I didn’t, not for a few months. Didn’t read either. Depression decided I needed a sabbatical.

My comeback stories are Old Truths for a Best Day and The Gosling, and when it came time to post The Gosling, none of my history as a writer mattered anymore. I couldn’t tell you if it was good or awful, if I’d be welcomed back or laughed out of Substack. The community, however, was supportive, and that helped me write another story.

That I’m writing at all feels like a miracle, and I certainly don’t worry about writing every day. I don’t have a routine, but I am finding my joy again.

What are my days like? I go to bed trying to remember why we can’t travel faster than the speed of light. We can’t because the experienced speed for light is instantaneous, and you can’t travel faster than that without going back in time. As witnessed from the outside, the faster an object travels through space, the slower it travels through time. The witnessed speed of light is C.

It’s vital that I understand these things because I manage a group home for adults with developmental disabilities. The relevance is obvious.

Today is Saturday, and on Saturdays, we visit our daughter. She’s a lawyer in the city. We home-schooled her since before she left Kindergarten because that’s the kind of people we were. I was an evangelical pastor; now I’m a progressive pain-in-the-ass.

Today we visited the museum for the Art in Bloom exhibit that pairs art with flower arrangements. In one small room, the only exhibit is a series of panels that reflect everything in monochrome, and it inspired this piece:

While viewing the remains of ancient sculptures, I was inspired with the title for my next story. With Old Truths, the inspiration was the opening. For Gosling, the story came to me whole, and I just needed to figure out how to make it work.

Intellectually, I believe in writing a bad first draft, but in practice, I usually have to believe where we are and where we’re going, and if I don’t, that’s a problem that can’t be fixed in post. That means I don’t end up with an ugly first draft, and it creates a problem when beta reader feedback suggests you need to fill-out the story more. How do you add to mostly polished piece with a working rhythm without destroying everything?

This time, I solved the dilemma by going through the story and identifying natural pauses in the rhythm. At each of point I placed a marker, allowing me to go back later and consider what (if anything) I wanted to add. It worked remarkably well.

I write at my late father’s desk, in the basement, on a Qwerkywriter keyboard that mimics the look and feel of a typewriter. It’s a first-generation model that I bought used off of Ebay and which was shipped unprotected. It lost a key en route, but I bought a replacement for $5. A few years later, the damage from that rough transit is showing in misbehaving keys. When I replace it, I’ll be buying another, but new this time.

I’m sharing this older picture of the setup so that I don’t have to clean. After lunch, my daughter took us to Subterranean books where I picked up If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin, but if it avoids more chores, a picture of All the Pretty Horses works just as well.

Some of you might notice that the 30-day view count was 15k. At one point, I reached double that. After being gone a few months and publishing two stories and one short essay, I’m currently running close to 2k views a month. To my surprise, the world didn’t end. My subscribers numbers and my paid subscribers have increased. I don’t have to push myself to constantly produce and can, instead, focus on writing the best stories I can.

Take care of yourself. Build a site that will help new readers find what you have to offer, and focus on quality. For me, that means The Literary Salon leads with a hero page that helps direct readers to my essays on prose, but you do what works for you.

Write the way that serves you best.

—Thaddeus Thomas

About the author: Now politically progressive but once an evangelical pastor, I lost my tribe for speaking out against Donald Trump. Lately, my stories have turned apocalyptic. Surely, one thing has nothing to do with the other.

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Old Truths for a Best Day

You’re not in trouble, but I need you to listen. Remember my words. Treat them like your potassium pills, and they’ll ward off the sickness to come. Can you do that?

Sarah said she’d remember everything. She promised.

Randall ruffled her hair and lost himself in innocence that radiated like a nuclear blast, but the half-life of a child’s trust could be measured in months. The teaching had to be done while her core still burned.

“You’re at an age,” he said, “where you understand the difference between who you are and who you pretend to be. You’ll lose that as you grow older.”

The Geiger counter waved a red finger. Chittering softly. Silencing him.

Sarah’s brow knitted, but her only worries would be whether she could go out to run and dance or if this was another indoor day. With the winds building in the east, indoor days could become basement days–could become bunker days–and he felt a blistering of guilt. Let her play while she still could.

But he didn’t want this to be a tomorrow talk, turning it into a lecture to be associated with cinder-block walls and second-rate beds. Best-day talks came with bright skies and bird song, and that’s where the truths of the old world belonged. Old truths for a best day.

“As you become a teenager–”

The counter hushed, and a new chittering rose in its place, the shuffling of shoes on snow-sheeted paving stones.

Sarah’s face double brightened. She knew the signature of that sound as well as he. Better. Her lips mouthed the word: Tommy.

Randall nodded, and Sarah sprung from the white sofa, sprinted past the grand piano they would never hear properly played, and skidded to a stop between the staircase and the windowed door where glass sparkled like jewels, cascading rainbows across her ill-fitted white dress. Beneath Tommy’s twisted shadow, those sparkles died like the memory of stars.

She opened the door and squealed as Tommy stepped into the foyer, slouched and hidden beneath a frayed hoodie. She spun in circles and talked about all the fun they would have in the snow. Dizzy and joy-drunk, she wrapped her arms around him. Her eyes closed and her smile widened, but Tommy shrugged her away.

Randall stood without thinking to stand; no one came into his house and disrespected his daughter. No one.

Tommy’s hands never left his pockets. He stood without purpose, a creature of resentment, indifference, and ego, and when he raised his head, when Randall could see his eyes beneath that raggedy hood, he spoke with all the eloquence of a paralyzed dog, two mumbled thoughts dropping from his mouth like rotten teeth: “Mom’s dead.”

Caitlyn. Tommy’s mother. Their neighbor. Dead.

Shit.

Tommy’s resentment became grief; Sarah’s pain became compassion; and bluster fizzled away, a great litany of damnable curses transformed into softly spoken words.

And Randall said, “I’m sorry.”

Caitlyn had embraced Sarah. She’d insisted the kids have “play dates” and, in this time of distrust and isolation, had become a true neighbor. Randall never wanted the intrusion, but he knew they’d been made richer by it.

Her death was the end of a future that no longer existed, a future that ended months before they met. Before Sarah found the manor. Before Randall found Sarah.

In truth, they’d all died with the world. There could be no tomorrow, and every today was the death spasm of a lost humanity. Caitlyn had dreamed of more, but like everything else, dreams die.

“I can’t bury her on my own,” Tommy said.

Sarah reached her hand for his. “I remember when my momma died.”

Tommy didn’t reach back, and Randall’s heart ached. Like so many others, Sarah had lost everything and pieced back together a life from what she could find. She’d adopted Randall as her stand-in father. Given the chance, she’d adopt Tommy as her best and only friend. Did she imagine more? At her age, Randall thought it possible, but his heart told him no.

Natural ringlets bobbed before Sarah’s eyes as her hand remained outstretched and unmet. Randall expected her to cry, to run back to him and bury her face in his side. Instead, she looked at Tommy with disapproving curiosity and said, “You’ve got no gun.”

Tommy shrugged.

“You don’t never leave the house without a gun,” she said.

“Didn’t much think about it,” Tommy said. “Didn’t much care.”

“You’d care if they found you.”

“Not really.”

Sarah’s mouth made a scandalized circle.

Randall put an end to the quarrel with a hand on Sarah’s shoulder. Tommy wouldn’t have welcomed his touch.

“We’ll help with the burial,” Randall said.

“Do you mind if we don’t go back right away?” Tommy said.

“We’ll take it in your time. There’s no rush and no needs to serve but our own. If you’re tired, it’s a good day. You can sleep in a good bed.”

“It’s a best day,” Sarah said, but nobody answered, no one at all, even when death was an old truth, and old truths were best shared on a best day.

“But even on a best day, you need a gun,” Sarah said.

Randall hushed her, but her comment caught in the recesses of his imagination. Taking up arms had become instinctual. Tommy would no sooner forget his weapon than walk out in the snow without shoes.

“I had to wait until it was safe to go outside,” Tommy said.

Randall said he understood, but danger grew in layers. Some came and went with the winds. Others hardened into the foundation of the world.

“She’s been in there a week,” Tommy said.

Randall said he understood, but what he understood was dark and dangerous. He’d seen women and children, exposed and unarmed, and had feared them more than any militia. Vulnerability only risked itself under a protective eye and only exposed itself to draw in the unwary.

Tommy wanted to appear harmless and knew he was protected. Caitlyn wasn’t dead. She was coming for Randall’s girl.

Clearly, they didn’t know Sarah as well as they thought. She didn’t need a father’s protection. She’d pointed a Glock 9mm at Randall’s head on the day they met. It’s why he’d believed her when she said she was alone but that he could eat something as long as he behaved. She’d kill him if he didn’t. It’s why he’d felt safe and slept like a child.

He’d eaten very little that first day. He’d been so emaciated, giving in to hunger would have killed him, but day by day, Sarah had strengthened him. He grew muscles again. Even a little fat.

Together, they felt like a family, but he’d always known this day would come. Kill the man. Take the girl. That’s how the new world worked.

But not Tommy. Not Caitlyn. They’d been different, at least Caitlyn had, full of hope and clinging to dreams.

Maybe that was who she pretended to be. Maybe, underneath, she was like everyone else. Maybe. His heart said no, but no one listened to their heart at the end of days. Hunger and lust spoke too loudly.

But Tommy didn’t want to go back, not right away.

If this were a ruse, right away was exactly what he’d need. Move quickly under the confusion of emotion. Rush Randall outside and into the sights of Caitlyn’s gun. Spring the trap before the quarry gets wise.

Kill the man. Take the girl.

Randall put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and felt him flinch. “I was just telling Sarah that she’s at an age where she understands the difference between who she is and who she pretends to be. When you’re a teenager, that goes away. We get this idea that the life we imagine can be the life we make real. The people who love us most can look like obstacles, good for nothing but holding us back. We resent what we have because of what we imagine.”

Tommy looked up at him.

“What matters is life as it is,” Randall said, “not life as we wish it to be.”

“I wish it were anything but this,” Tommy said.

Randall had rebuffed Caitlyn’s intrusion into their lives. Sarah, he could keep safe, but Caitlyn came and went as she pleased. He’d told her she was risking all their lives, that when they came for her they’d kill her son.

To sweep up Sarah in her fantasies would be selfish and cruel.

“Tell me about your mother.”

Tommy stared at his own feet.

“Tell me what she wished for,” Randall said.

But it was Sarah who answered.

“My momma used to tell me that some dreams never go away, no matter what happens.”

Randall hadn’t believed in dreams and certainly not in family, not before Sarah. What she’d given, he wouldn’t easily surrender to another, especially not this whisper of a boy.

Sarah would understand. She’d have to.

“What did your mother tell you, Tommy?” Randall said, and he heard anger in the cutting edge of his voice. “Did she have dreams for you and Sarah?”

Beneath his touch, Tommy’s shoulders hunched forward, as if he would curl into a ball.

“Tell me.”

“It was stupid.”

Randall softened his tone. “Tell me.”

Again, Sarah answered. “My momma said that some dreams are built into us. Countries fight, but we all still need to be human. It can’t be helped.”

Tommy’s voice barely raised beyond his lips. “Mine was kind of the same way.”

Sarah looked up into Randall’s face, her eyes wide with fresh understanding. “Tommy will live with us now, right?”

Randall wanted that Glock pressed to the side of his head. He wanted to feel safe again. He wanted to sleep and know nothing would hurt him in the night. It’s what he should have given Sarah but what she had given him. Peace. Security. Belonging.

Now this scarecrow of a child had come to take it all away.

Randall’s grip tightened. “How’d your mother die?”

Tommy didn’t answer.

“My momma got stabbed over a bucket of drinking water,” Sarah said.

Tommy didn’t answer.

Randall lifted Tommy’s chin until they could see each other. Tommy cried, but men cried over killing other men. Tears never meant safety.

“She told me the future belongs to the young,” Tommy said, “and then she put a pistol in her mouth.”

Randall let go, and Tommy’s face disappeared beneath his hood.

“Shot herself,” Sarah said.

Randall looked through the jewel-like glass to a splintered view of the front lawn. No one waited, but he felt the presence of the gun. He felt the pressure of it in his mouth, the taste of metal on his tongue.

Sarah wrapped her arms around Tommy’s waist. He didn’t push her away.

“Damn fool,” Randall muttered, but as he watched the kids hold each other, he knew Caitlyn had been half right. The kind of future she wanted couldn’t be stolen. All she could do was offer it as a gift, and with all their walls and all their division, perhaps this seemed the only way through.

Tommy looked up, and in his eyes, Randall saw the boy’s pain and need for answers.

“The future belongs to the young,” Randall said, “but today belongs to us all.”

Outside, the wind howled, and the counter chittered its warning.

— Thaddeus Thomas

Gripping a reader’s attention focuses on the fundamentals of storytelling over the mechanics of writing. Sentence structure be damned. But when we get our writing out of the way, the story’s hook has a chance to sink, and now we have a reader. The writing matters.

In the opening paragraph, require as little as possible of the reader. Don’t interrupt the flow of your sentences or overload your reader with descriptions or minutiae. Make the paragraph impossible not to read and leave them with a fundamental understanding of the story they’re about to encounter.

We begin by removing interruptions.

Sally, whose eyes twinkled in the moonlight, swung astride her horse…

While it’s perfectly fine sentence construction, by interrupting our subject and verb, we make our reader work. That’s wonderful when the reader is committed to the task, but in the beginning of a story, a thousand distractions vie for her attention. Every mental stumble is an opportunity for her to choose something else.

Sally swung astride her horse and listened for any errant noise. The prairie lay dark and silent, as if listening back…

Challenge every prepositional phrase, not only for its necessity but for its rhythm within the sentence. Every redundancy and every break of rhythm is another opportunity to move on to something else.

Sally swung astride her horse and listened. The prairie lay dark and silent, as if listening back.

Focus now swings into…well…focus.

Before I continue, I can step back and say what I couldn’t earlier. This is one theory. There are many ways to capture your reader, and even if you choose this method, the techniques employed don’t have to be used throughout the entire story. Remember, this is about getting out of your reader’s way until she’s committed to the story.

I saved that statement until now because I wanted to grab your attention and make you interested in what I had to say. Once that was achieved, then I could interrupt myself, slow things down, and offer a little backstory. In the name of fairness, we front-load our articles with caveats, each one of them a reason not to read. We front-load our stories with interruptions and minutiae. To achieve relevance, we require delayed satisfaction from our readers.

But with this present theory, relevance is the focus of the opening. The reader thematically connects with the story and is now eager to read.

Sally swung astride her horse and listened. The prairie lay dark and silent, as if listening back. Time’s face turned away, and a thousand chains let loose their shackles. She could do anything, be anyone. Her father would have no say.

The reader finishes the opening paragraph, and she understands the story. We haven’t yet described Sally, but we know the central dilemma. We reinforce that dilemma when her father calls out and this spiritual reprieve is interrupted.

An alternative opening would begin with father crying out. In such a case, relevance is treated as a mystery for the reader to solve. I once thought it the only way to write.

But with our focus on thematic conflict, the mysteries come later, and the hook is linked to the story’s stakes. The example works if the story continues by introducing her controlling father and perhaps her real-life hope of escape. It doesn’t work the same way if the paragraph is followed by her riding off into the sunrise, leaving her old life behind and ready for adventure. Juxtaposed to such a tale, the opening paragraph becomes backstory.

Our suggested method reveals current conflict, not the origins of present actions. It’s important, because it quickly helps the reader answer the opening’s key question: why am I reading this? An engaged reader knows what she’s reading and why.

The longer it takes a reader to answer that question, the more likely she is to slip away.

— Thaddeus Thomas

Have you read my latest short story?

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The Gosling

They came like your naked grandmother, bald and four-footed, hunched upon stilt-like legs. That’s what the newsies heard. It’s what they repeated. It’s what Daryl believed. No one ever said anything different.

With the calcium ammonium nitrate in the coffee grinder, Daryl pulled a fifty-pound bag of icing sugar from the pantry. Beth and the girls watched from beyond the bakery’s shattered glass. Behind them, dawn broke over red-brick buildings, and the little strip they called downtown changed, becoming what it was when Daryl was a boy, probably what it was when the first stores opened in ‘46. For a few, sun-glorious seconds, he saw the memory of a world, young and healthy.

He looked to the boy with the backpack and the mouth full of news.

“As a child, I’d ride my bike through downtown on the way to school,” he said. “I’d leave too early and arrive too early so that when I passed by, that fresh-baked aroma was still strong and clung to me like hope. No better smell on that pre-forsaken earth.”

“They’ve passed as far south as Grover, but that was three days ago,” said the boy. “They eat what they take, so that’ll slow them down some, but a town the size of Grover won’t last no three days.”

Death worked like a hive, snagging its victims and keeping them in a communal feeding area where hundreds of naked grandmothers ate and shat until the food ran out and the shit ran high. Then death moved on.

Daryl dragged another bag of icing sugar from the pantry and then a third. He looked to the boy with some faint notion of finding help, but the boy had come with news and nothing more. Daryl went back to the pallet. The bags wouldn’t be going far. He could handle it on his own. There’d be plenty of rest when he was done.

Beth called out to him from the sidewalk, saying she was strong enough to help.

They’d talked about this. For at least a month, they’d discussed how today should go, and together, they’d decided that he’d do the work. The girls wouldn’t be alone.

“There may be a doll left in the store,” Daryl said.

Beth stood her ground, and the girls didn’t even glance in the direction of possible toys. Such promises had lost their meaning.

“Okay then,” he said.

“You wait here,” Beth said to the girls, and she stepped through the glass.

“Ma’am,” said the boy.

“We haven’t had a newsie pass through in weeks,” Beth said. Then she took hold of a bag by its corners and dragged it out through the opening and into the road, and when she was done, she sat on the bag and made a whooping sound full of dignity and the pride of effort.

Daryl looked up at the sound and smiled.

“We used to think they wanted their meat fresh,” the boy said.

Beth pushed herself up from the road, ruffled the hair of her youngest, passed through the glass, and took hold of another bag.

“Ma’am,” said the boy.

“What do we think now?” she asked.

“Ma’am?”

“What do we think now that we didn’t think before?”

“They’ve been seen eating carcasses off the road, roadkill, bloated, and reeking of rot,” said the boy.

“Roadkill,” she said.

“People. Those killed in the riots.”

“They eat carrion. That sounds adaptable to me. That sound adaptable to you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“They were never said to adapt.”

“We didn’t think them capable, no.”

“But now we know better.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She dragged away another bag.

Daryl returned to the grinder, covered his mouth, and worked by hand what was intended to run by motor, cranking a handle he doubted had ever been connected before today. It moved easier this time, the grains being finer now and putting up less resistance.

“I’ve reports of how they digest their food,” said the boy.

Daryl glanced at the girls. Four, six, and eight. His first memories were of being four, most of his first memories, anyway. The world was full of discovery then, and every new thought felt profound.

It was strange how, on that journey from gosling to gander, the ignorant wisdom of new eyes became the foolish knowledge of youth.

Beth returned for more sugar. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”

“Eye witnesses out of Boston and Tullahoma,” said the boy.

“It’s the eye-witness part I don’t understand.”

“Boston was still heavily populated. A few made it out. At Tullahoma, the witnesses were hunters, camouflaged, with scopes at a distance.”

Daryl wanted to say they’d hit plenty of populated areas and plenty heavy with hunters, instead he asked the boy what any of that had to do with how the creatures’ digestion worked.

“They don’t digest their food internally,” said the boy. “They vomit fluids while the catch is still living.”

Daryl grabbed a bag of sugar, pulled it to his shoulder, and walked out, passing Beth along the way. Her voice drifted back to him.

“They do the same with a carcass?” she asked.

Down the fall of the road and up the rise, thin crowds gathered, moving Daryl’s way. He couldn’t hear the boy’s answer.

He raised a hand in greeting. A dozen hands raised in return. The world went quiet. He could almost hear his own wind chimes play their strange song from the wraparound porch of their two-story, clapboard house, white as bone among well-tended flowerbeds, spotless and pure but for the occasional flurries of ash.

He pondered that ash and remembered its taste. Other towns. Other families anointing their homes one last time, transforming themselves into the soil which had supported their generations.

Bits of ash had lodged themselves in his daughters’ lungs, flavored their breath, and punished them with coughing fits. One more click of the clock. Time was running out. Death would come by fire or cloaked in baggy flesh and perched on lanky limbs. It’s what the stories said, each echoing the same inescapable horror.

Their meager farms failed. The food stores wouldn’t last. Months ago, they’d worked in teams to search root cellars and inventory what provisions remained, but—

—A tiny hand grabbed his trouser leg and tugged.

Even before he turned, before he understood the trouble, his hand whipped to the pistol tucked in his waistband. Before he could pull it free, he saw Beth holding hers and pointing it in the boy’s drained-white face. Her own flushed red.

Beth’s words broke clean and clear in all that silence. “You’re no witness.”

Daryl motioned for the girls to stay behind and then stepped through the glass. “If he’d seen, he wouldn’t have survived to spread the news.”

Her voice became something feral. “Not even those piles of manure left behind? Shouldn’t somebody somewhere have seen something?”

“Apparently, they have,” Daryl said.

“Boston and Tullahoma. Where the hell is Tullahoma?”

The boy said nothing.

Daryl answered for him. “Tennessee, I believe.”

“Well, it ain’t here,” Beth said. “Neither are they.”

“You rather we leave?”

“I don’t rather nothing.” Her grip on the pistol loosened.

Daryl walked past her and checked the grinder. The fertilizer looked like sand. He funneled the powder into a paper sleeve.

Beth’s voice settled. “I’d like to have heard something, anything, from someone who’s seen.”

Daryl dropped the last chunks of the ammonium nitrate through the grinder’s top. “I can’t fathom what difference that would make.”

“It’d make a difference.”

He pulled on the handle, and for a long second it barely budged. “How so?”

“It’d make a difference to me.”

The handle turned, and the room filled with the noise of gears turning and teeth gnashing.

“We chose to keep living our lives in this place and with these people,” he said. “I can’t imagine having done it any other way. Does that change now?”

“Did you hear what they do with the rotted ones?”

Daryl stopped grinding. Beth looked away from the boy. Looked right into him. Daryl saw a familiar emotion in those eyes, strength buckling beneath an inescapable weight. He pulled his own pistol and aimed it at the boy. As if released, Beth came to him. He took her in his arms, and she tensed against his chest, her fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt, clinging to him like a climber clings to the mountain.

“It never mattered before,” he whispered. “It doesn’t change anything now.”

But it did matter. Whether it changed anything or not, every detail mattered.

“I don’t regret a single day,” she said.

“Until now.”

“Not even now,” she said.

Now had come the time of second guesses, as clear as any mark on the clock. Click. The news. Click. The doubt. Click. Peace with that which could not be appeased.

Click. The news. Always the same and always believed. Click. And now? If they proved it all lies, the clock still clicked. If they proved it all dreams, the ash still fell. If it be nothing but ghost stories, even stories had an end.

“They don’t vomit on the dead and bloated,” Daryl said. “They suck up the rot.”

“You were listening.”

“That’s just what it has to be.”

She drew her mouth close to his ear. “When they come, they’ll suck us up, too, whatever’s left. We were meant to be escaping that.”

Outside, the first of the others gathered behind the girls, each couple carrying their own heavy load.

“From some things, there is no escape,” Daryl said.

She took one long breath, pulled herself out of his embrace, and with a touch of her fingers, lowered his pistol arm.

“I still wish you’d seen them with your own eyes,” she said to the boy. “It’s the one thing today needed.”

Daryl walked the boy out through the glass and the gathering crowd. He pointed to the valley, to the white farmhouse where sunlight reflected off wind chimes. “Some provisions. Even now. You’re welcome to what you can carry.”

The boy shook his hand.

“Where you off to?” Daryl asked.

“Heading south until I run out of road.”

“Just as likely to meet them there.”

“I know.”

Daryl put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “If it weren’t for men like you, we’d have no notion of what’s going on in the world. I don’t have much news to offer in return, but you can say that Gosser’s Gap was a place where generations were born and raised. A good many of us decided a change in the world needn’t mean a change in us.”

Beth stood with the girls. The youngest buried her face into the back of Beth’s thigh.

The boy walked on.

The crowd grew thicker and, one-by-one, set their explosives in the street. Children glanced at one another without smiling. Adults spoke of the quality of the sky and the lingering scent of rain.

Daryl held Beth’s hand, and the girls pressed in close. They’d gathered in these same streets for the town’s bicentennial, the same couples, the same friends, but there’d been babies that day. No babies now. His four-year-old and those few her age were the last to experience the depth of first-discovered thoughts. He wondered what she’d tell him if he asked her about today, but he knew he’d never ask, not even if seconds stretched into eternity.

Down the road, the boy stopped and watched. Perhaps he felt it necessary, and Daryl supposed they’d goaded him into bearing witness. The boy. The gosling. The fool. Mouth full of news. Mouth full of lies. No idea which was which. No notion whether he spread life or death and not enough sense to ask.

Daryl had been such a boy on mornings when the air carried bread like ash and the chatter of fools carried no more consequence than the passing of time.

-end-

Thaddeus Thomas

For the full journey, you’ll read the original version of Cherry Soda, come back and read my editor notes, read the first rewrite of the story, come back and read my final notes, and finally read read the final version. You can also do whatever combination makes sense to you.

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One: The original version of Cherry Soda

Two: My first editorial notes:

Dear Haley,

It’s rare that I’ve offered to do this, but something struck me about your story, and in it, I see a path for you to make some quick advancements as a writer. The critique process can be painful, but that’s not my intent. I chose your story because I see potential.

The Quick Fixes:

First, there’s the issue of “the diner table” which is an awkward construction. For far too long, I wasn’t sure if you meant dinner table. That’s some confusion we can avoid by removing “at the diner table” entirely.

When talking about Jenny’s boyfriend, you write: “She’d had a crush on him…” You mean Becky had a crush, but the structure of the sentence suggests that the “she” in question is Jenny. We can solve that by replacing the pronoun with the correct name.

Describing the stranger as looking like a beatnik is jarring. It’s an uncommon reference and suggests the story takes places sixty years ago. It’s also unnecessary, as you then show us what that means. We can solve that by removing the beatnik reference.

You need to make it clear from the beginning that it’s night, but there’s more that needs to be established early on.

Some More Difficult Issues:

The tone of the story isn’t horror, and that’s okay if that’s your intent. However, the reveal should be foreshadowed. It needs to feel right for the story, and to do that we need to establish certain themes earlier. Five paragraphs in, you tell us she’s hungry, but that hunger is the key theme. Consider tying a rumbling tummy to the slurping of her cherry soda in the first paragraph, thereby tying the hunger to your metaphor for drinking blood. Don’t just tell us she’s hungry. It’s a key point. Make us feel it.

Then you can remove the hunger reference later, as the reader will be keenly aware. It’s a paragraph of contradictory statements, anyway. She didn’t eat all day in anticipation of eating lots of junk food but then ordered the smallest burger and fries. It’s more likely that she didn’t eat because she’s self-conscious around her “friends”, but you don’t have to tell us that. As we feel her hunger and then see her discomfort around her thin, childhood friends, we’ll understand.

More Work-Intensive Issues:

Becky is too unguarded and trusting. You felt this and tried to adjust for it by having her question herself after the fact, and that’s a tactic we’ve all tried at some point. I’d like to see you go back and rework the dialog to justify them walking together. If it’s a case of hypnotic suggestion, give hints without saying outright. Perhaps she thinks she’s dizzy from hunger.

Watch for phrases which add no meaning. I’ll illustrate using the first paragraph. (I’ll also remove the “diner table” reference as that’s a different problem.)

Becky froze as everyone turned around and stared at her. She’d just made a loud slurping noise finishing the last of her cherry soda. She hadn’t meant to; it was a force of habit with her.

That they stare at her is implied. She’s sitting next to them, so they don’t turn around. They just turn and look, and we can assume her slurping her drink wasn’t someone else’s habit.

In the silence of that moment, before she’s able to apologize and when everyone’s attention is on her, that would be the most impactful moment to add the tummy rumble, adding to her embarrassment.

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Three: The first rewrite of the story

Four: My notes after the rewrite:

I’ve just begun, but I’m really liking what you’ve done with it. I’ll point out some trifles as they come to mind, and we’ll see what’s to be addressed after.

I would recommend removing this line:

Sally, Jenny and Mary-sue. They were all thin and pretty and looked great in the latest fashions. She was too fat to look good in anything. Each of them had a boy seated next to them. She was sitting alone in the corner of the booth.

You set up her weight issue well enough without it, and it doesn’t quite land the way you want.

Capitalize both names in Mary Sue.

Some minor points and suggestions:

She broke into a run, not wanting to hear anymore [any more]. Cool, night air brushed her wet face as she burst through the doors. Tears ran freely now. Her shoulders shook as she sobbed [period needed]

She heard [H]her stomach growl[ed] again, there was [like] a hole sucking on her insides. She didn’t even get to eat anything and she wanted food so bad.

I’m making these recommendations because, if we’re making the same point twice, we want to keep the stronger one. We want to remove the filter of her hearing her stomach. Now we hear it instead, and the intimacy between us and the character grows. We change the comma splice into a simile, easing the flow of the sentence, and finally we remove what we know and what can be inferred and get right to the the point.

The elements the story needed are falling into place. This is very promising.

She startled at the voice coming from behind. It sounded like an 80 year old man who’d smoked twenty packs a day from birth.

I want to suggest simplifying this into one long sentence or two fragments. Remove the direction. Make the thought flow.

To her surprise, the speaker was a young man.

This line doesn’t work. It destroys so much of what you’re building up by removing the intimacy and distancing the reader from the characters and the story. The culprits are “to her surprise” and “the speaker”.

He was dressed in a leather jacket and had a goatee [I corrected the spelling]. His thick curls sprang wildly from underneath a poor boy cap, reminding her of a lion. He smelled of tobacco [spelling again—maybe these are regional differences?] and motor oil.

If you want, you can cut the line that doesn’t work and have this one begin: He was a young man dressed in…

Only I don’t recommend keeping the word dressed. I want something that will work with both the leather jacket and the goatee. Styled is a choice. He was a young man, styled in a leather jacket and goatee. If he were a different type of character he could be hiding behind them, but that doesn’t feel right. Sporting instead of styled in would work, as would boasting.

I want to suggest Thick curls instead of His thick curls, and mostly that doesn’t matter, except that you’re running a series of sentences that begin with He and this one begins with His. Remove the word and you improve the variation.

Not the kind of man she should be talking to. She glanced around; [T]the street was empty except for the two of them. Her heart beat a little faster.

Nice. I know it’s strange to say I like it when I’m suggesting cuts, but the removals are meant to reveal what’s already there.

“Sure, I’m fine,” she muttered and wiped her tears.

“Oh sorry, I should have known you were crying tears of joy.”

She didn’t have anything to say to that. He took out a pack of cigarettes from his jean pocket.

“I saw what happened. Great friends you’ve got there.”

“Well, I guess they aren’t really my friends. What’s it to you?”

“Oh nothing. I just don’t think anyone deserves to be treated that way.”

The dialog was something I wanted to address more after the initial rewrite, but this is so much better. It feels much more natural. I’m going to make suggestions anyway, but with everything I suggest, remember that it’s just my opinion.

My suggestion is the last line. This is the climax of this micro-segment of dialog, Cut the fluff.

“Oh nothing. I just don’t think anyone [No one] deserves to be treated that way.”

His words caused [Her] tears to well up again. She blinked and looked away. Her head was swimming [swam] and the ground felt unsteady beneath her.

Again, I’m cutting to reveal what’s there (and to keep verb tenses consistent). The last line of the paragraph is different, though.

She really needed something to eat.

There’s a missed opportunity here to tie this into the segue you’re attempting with the dialog. You need to give her a reason to walk with this stranger and also reveal the impact her hunger is having. Right now, you’ve shown us and then told us with that closing line.

I suggest you cut that line and replace it with new dialog. He says she doesn’t look well. She says she’s just hungry. Low blood sugar. He says they’ve got to get something in her, and until they do, she’s in no shape to walk alone.

She wants to decline but can’t. Instead, she accepts his protection.

That’s how I think you can best use the details you’ve built up to move her into the situation the story needs.

Now these lines go:

“Thanks. I should be getting home.”

“Okay. How you getting there?”

“Oh, I’ll walk, my neighborhood is just a few blocks away.”

But work this in as part of his offer to help get her home:

“I could give you a lift.” He inclined his head towards a Harley Davidson parked a few feet away.

She struggled to come up with the right thing to say to get him to leave her alone without making him mad. Her head felt like it was stuffed with cotton wool and she couldn’t think properly.

Her response changes, though. Focus on the details of her dizziness from hunger. She tells him she’s afraid she’d fall off.

“No thank you, I can’t get on a bike. My father would kill me.”

He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

She took two steps and stumbled.

“Woah, you okay there.[?]”

“Yeah, I’m just feeling a little woozy.”

Keep it focused and tight.

“I don’t like letting you go off into the street like this. Let me walk with you a bit.”

Maybe he was dangerous, maybe she would collapse in the road on the way home, she didn’t know anymore. She was too hungry and tired and faint to argue.

“All right,” she agreed.

The long sentence is a comma splice. Twice. Keep it if you want. Change it into abrupt, short sentences if you prefer.

They walked in silence for a bit. The dizziness had faded, but her thoughts were covered in a thick blanket. She couldn’t concentrate on anything with her stomach gnawing at her.

You repeat the phrase “a bit” in close proximity. Cut this one. Keep the tense intimate. Don’t explain your metaphor. You’ve set it up. We’re with you.

“I never got your name,” she said, trying to regain focus. “I’m Becky, by the way.”

“You can call me Steve.”

“All right, Steve. So, are you a part of a biker gang or something?”

“A gang? No way. I ride solo. I’m a lone wolf.”

“So what do you do for a living?”

“I don’t do anything for a living, I just live. Each morning, I get on my bike and go wherever the road takes me. I sleep under the stars. I do whatever I want.”

“So you’re a bum.”

“That’s what most people would call me, I suppose.”

“I think I might envy you. It sounds so free. Still, it must be a hard life, on the streets.”

“Not for me.”

When she calls him a bum, it’s too direct. She’s not that impolite. The reference to her father didn’t work for me before, and I think I’m going to suggest removing the idea that she still lives with her parents. We’ll see when we get that far, but this is where a reference would work: “My dad would say you’re a bum.”

I almost wrote “father” because that’s the word you used. Is Becky the kind of person who call him father or would she call him dad?

The moon ducked in and out behind the oak trees as they reached the suburbs. Closer to food. There was leftover chicken, and ice cream in the freezer, and Cheez Whiz…

“Don’t you ever get lonely though?” she asked.

He took a drag from his cigarette.

“Sure, course I do. But it’s better this way. Safer for people to stay away from me.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I’ve never been cut out for civilized society. My appetites are just too strong. I’ve tried to fight them, truly I have. But I always lose.”

I love that section.

She supposed he was talking about alcohol or drugs. Or women? Who was she to judge, when all she could think about was getting home so she could stuff her face.[?]

“I see,” she said. “You know, I think I might become a lone wolf too. People are just too mean and fake. Who needs ‘em’.”

“Good for you. With enemies like those, who needs friends, right.[?]”

She glanced away, smiling. Then stopped walking.

“Well, here we are.”

“Your parents. They home?” he asked.

“No, they went to a party.”

I’m going to suggest something more subtle from him and less reckless from her. He’ll ask something like: anyone home to make sure you’re okay?

“Yeah,” she lied. “I’ll be fine.”

The second part of that suggestion is whatever, but I really want her response to be instinctual. She doesn’t know why she’s lying. We don’t know. But we know she is lying and there’s no one waiting for her. She’s in danger.

“I just want to say, those boys are fools. I think you’re just swell. I like a girl with some meat on her bones.”

I think swell is interesting. It’s anachronistic. That character shouldn’t say it. No one in 2025 should say it, but least of all him. It reveals something about his character. He’s not who he appears to be, and part of that, is he’s much older and carrying slang from another time.

The just is overdoing it, however.

She forced a smile. She [and] felt exposed, like she was standing there naked, even with all her clothes on.

I’m addressing these sentences separately because their needs are different. The part above just needs tightening up.

The second part:

What had she been thinking, walking around at night with a strange man.

I want you to give this sentence style. You can ask the first part of your question (and remember your question mark) and then follow it by fragments. One or two words each. That’s one option. You choose, but it needs some stylistic punch. It’s an important thought and needs to drive home its point with panache.

“Well… Good night then. Thanks for walking me home.”

He flicked his half[-]finished cigarette to the pavement and stomped on it.

“Good night Becky. It was real nice talking to you.”

“Nice talking to you too. Good night.”

She took several steps backward, turned around towards the house. Picked up her pace. Then b[B]roke into a run.

Turned around is unnecessary and too much, other than that, the other cuts are a matter of taste. Entirely optional.

Arms like steel bars locked around her waist, pulled her to the ground. Fangs glinted in the moonlight. Then the sting, just above her collarbone.

She tried to fight him, but it was like trying to lift a truck. Tried to scream, but had no breath.

Hot blood trickled down her chest and pooled on the lawn. The last thing she saw before she closed her eyes was the safety of her house a few feet away.

The important cut here is “pooled on the lawn.” When in her POV, and I don’t think she sees that.

“You’re a vampire.”

“And now, so are you.”

I think it works better if you don’t state the obvious. Also, no comma needed here:

I didn’t realize how lonely I was, until I saw you sitting there in that diner, fighting a hunger you could never satisfy.

When he says, It does feel great, don’t it? That turn of phrase turns the statement into a question. I think it needs a question mark, but if you intentionally want it the other way, that’s cool.

Her hunger was worse than ever. Her body [shook] was shaking with [an] overwhelming urge to bite into flesh.

If you keep the ending a little less direct, I think it really works.

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Five: My Notes Upon Reading the Third Draft

(I’ll share the link to the final / third (or is it fourth?) draft at the end.)

You’ve come so far, and you’re almost ready.

She’d been so desperate to not [to] stay home on a Saturday night, she’d accepted an invitation to eat out that was offered out of pity. She’d drifted away from her childhood friends over the years, yet kept hanging on, begging for their scraps, hoping something would change, somehow.

Here, we have a repeated use of she’d which we need to tone down. Using it to start two sentences and an additional phrase within that first sentence is too much.

The second note is a split infinitive, but split infinitives are acceptable now. It’s not the crime our English teacher’s made us believe, and while I’ve taught myself to be comfortable with the phrasing “not to stay home,” you might not be. If you want to keep the split infinitive, keep it.

Sally, Jenny and Mary-Sue. They were all thin and pretty and looked great in the latest fashions. Each of them had a boy seated next to them. Becky She was sitting alone in the corner of the booth.

Becky is not the subject of the rest of the paragraph, so you can’t reference her with a pronoun without causing confusion over who you mean.

“You need to get some food in you. You need a lift?.” He inclined his head towards a Harley Davidson parked a few feet away.

We can avoid the repetition of starting both sentences in the dialog with you because the you can be left understood, without being written.

Only it’s not just the you. The need is also a problem. Change one.

Some possibilities:

You’ve got to get some food in you. / You gotta get some food in you.

-or-

Want a lift? / Wanna lift? (Depending on how he should speak)

(Also remember to remove the extra period.)

She struggled to come up with the right thing to say to get him to leave her alone without making him mad. Her head felt like it was stuffed with cotton wool and she couldn’t think properly.

Here the repetition is the string of prepositional phrases all beginning with to.

Instead of “the right thing to say” she can struggle to come up with the right words, so he’d leave her alone…

But now we’ve changed the sentence so the ending “without making him mad” don’t have the logical link you’d created. You can choose to change the phrasing, but the phrase can also be assumed. I’d cut the phrase and end with leave her alone.

“Woah, you okay there.”

That’s a question. Give it a question mark.

“All right,” she agreed.

Style choice: you do what seems right for you. I’d leave off the speech tag. It feels redundant.

She felt something else. Hunger hit her senseless. Her whole body ached with it. It was no longer burgers and chips she was craving.

Did you mean hunger hit her senses or that hunger hit her and left her senseless? Either way, I’d cut the word. It’s confusing.

You have two uses of the word it back to back. You can cut the first usage with losing any meaning. That’s also why I recommended cutting “her senseless” instead of just “senseless,” because otherwise, you have the same word, back to back.

Those are my final recommendations. When you’re ready to publish, send me the links to the various versions! Well done.

Six: The Final Story

I’ve offered notes on a few stories before but never in stages. This approach allowed me to address the necessary points without overwhelming the author, and I hope that, in the end, both she and you are pleased with the results.

I love what she did with the story, and I’m honored to have played a role.

Read the final version here.

— Thaddeus Thomas

Short not Sweet

Short Story: Cherry Soda

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a year ago · 2 likes · Hayley Stone

On Sunday, she’ll make the next two drafts available, and Monday morning, I’ll publish my notes.

This editing pass is a little different than the ones I’ve done before. Haley is a genre writer from South Africa, and the original story had already been published on her Substack. I reached out to her and asked if she’d be interested in my editing notes, guiding her through a couple more drafts of the story, and that’s where this is different. In the past, I’ve offered my feedback, and that was it. This time, that feedback came in stages with Haley going back to work on the story each time.

God bless her. That took a lot of patience for a story that was supposed to be finished. It also took bravery, both because such a process can be painful but also because there’s no guarantee that my opinions would help improve the story. For me, that’s the bonus of this approach of offering feedback only in cases where I feel so inspired and believe that I have something to add. I come into this already certain I could help.

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I’ve shared my opinion on editorial and writing advice in the past. Some people are gifted and skilled editorial artists, and the man I’ve called “Substack’s Editor” is one of them. He and I may no longer be friends, but talent is talent.

The problem I have with most editorial feedback probably doesn’t apply to any of you, but you know people it does apply to. Some writers give bad writing advice, and they love telling everyone what to do. It’s one of the reasons I don’t support the idea of publicly giving advice on people’s fiction without consent.

Substack authors see the efforts being made to support other writers and think its masturbatory; the better use of our efforts, they say, would be to tell writers where their work could improve.

No matter what ideas we get from Notes, Substack isn’t just writers writing for writers. If we flood stories with unsolicited advice, that writer’s readers will see that, and they don’t know enough to understand when advice is warranted and good and when it’s not. I don’t see that being helpful.

Even if the advice is wonderful, it’s not always appropriate in that space.

So, do I think I’m an exception to the rule? No. I’m not offering unsolicited advice in a writer’s comments. Nor do I come to this believing I’m the answer to Substack’s problem.

I see a story with issues I believe I can address, and I offer to do so, if the author is interested. I ask to do it publicly (in my Substack not theirs) to make my time spent worthwhile, and that’s an option for anyone who’d like to do this. Offering thoughts privately is also a good option.

Check out Short not Sweet, and if editing notes interest you, watch for Monday’s post.

—Thaddeus Thomas

Short not Sweet

Not so sweet short fiction.

By Hayley Stone