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 Four Rs

• 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

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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If you haven’t already read the article, I’d love for you to click over and have a look. I was thrilled when they reached out and asked me to write on the subject, and since then, it’s stirred up a lively conversation. You’ll find links to additional Substack articles at the bottom.

To introduce the topic, I began with a brief overview of the time periods that led up to metamodernism, for it isn’t a movement or a manifesto but an attempt to define the time in which we currently find ourselves.

In my overview of our modern time periods, I focused on meaning and grand narratives, which was a dangerous choice as the potential was ripe to carry over old prejudices from the church. Postmodernism’s supposed abandonment of grand narratives was a threat to our beliefs which hinged on grand narratives. I’ve little doubt that some of that old condescension and mischaracterization carried over.

My article serves as an introduction and has been praised for it brevity and clarity, so if metamodernism is new to you, it’s not a bad place to start. There’s much to explore from here, and I don’t come to this pretending to be the expert. The folks at The Republic saw where I’d enthusiastically talked about the subject and, being unfamiliar with the term themselves, asked me to write about it.

As part of the ongoing discussion, questions have been raised about my focus on meaning and grand narratives. For one, does metamodernism have anything to say about grand narratives, as my article suggests? In an interview with Tank, Vermeulen, one of the authors of the defining article on the subject (Notes on Metamodernism) said this:

There are many ways one could approach a review of the time periods from modernism to metamodernism, but the search for meaning both in life and in literature is the approach that interests me the most. We’ll get more into that in a moment, but let me first quote a line from the article that seems to has caused some confusion:

It’s the last half of that line that’s caused some stumbling, and I’m not surprised. Most of the article is me reporting on the ideas of others. I don’t recall a direct source for this particular notion, but when I recognized the pattern, it struck hard because we focus on the rebellion of the modernist against Romanticism to the point where we talk like one had nothing in common with the other. That’s proved to be an oversimplification, for the shared thread is the failure of rationalism. Yes, modernism is a reaction to and against Romanticism, set against the world-shifting backdrop of industrialization and WWI, as I say in the article, but modernism was also a reaction to and against the whole of the Age of Reason.

Perhaps it was unfair of me to toss this nuance into an article that’s meant to be an introduction, but the primary failure that modern man must grapple with is that a rise out of superstition and ignorance and into rational thought didn’t lead to our salvation. Instead, it created a world war, twice, and with that second conflict came the threat of nuclear annihilation. Romanticism may not have seen that coming, but it was still a reaction against man’s faith in his rational nature. Romanticism went in the opposite direction to that which modernism would eventually take, in part because Romanticism was a moment born in the agrarian world that had always been, and its solution (in part) was a renewed focus on nature and emotion.

Modernism, on the other hand, came to be as humanity was stripped from that old life and thrust into the life of the city.

It can be much easier to say what something is than what it isn’t, for if I say that modernism placed meaning on the everyman in his new city-centered existence, that doesn’t preclude it from being many other things as well. If, however, my focus is elsewhere, and I attempt to say that modernism wasn’t about meaning, that’s a claim that attempts to carry the weight of an unknown universe. In this case, it fails. Meaning absolutely was an aspect of modernist literature.

In the article, I say that eventually we could find no meaning because postmodernism said there was no meaning to find. Some of that old church taint seeped into the way I discussed it, but the broader meaning of that particular thought was how these time-focused descriptions become prescriptive burdens that time eventually shakes loose. Still, my brief overview of how that happened within postmodernism was less than fair.

After all:

I also said that deconstruction and irony were tools meant to reveal a total lack of meaning. Even if we replace skepticism for a total lack of meaning, deconstruction is still a delicate subject to raise. However, in contemplating this, something has occurred to me; I’d accepted the idea that our contemporary use of deconstruction was at odds with Derrida’s meaning, and I’m sure this may still be true in ways I’m not considering here. Even so, the argument I remember depended on defining our use of deconstruction as separating a concept into its pieces, but even a cursory glance at the pop-culture love affair with deconstructing superheroes reveals the failure of that definition.

The “evil Superman” trope is a deconstruction of the myth in which a binary concept is taken so that the privilege is moved to the marginalized counterpoint. The myth of Superman focuses on his goodness, and so in deconstructing Superman, privilege is placed on a self-centered or dictatorial nature within the Superman figure. It’s a simplified version of the concept but very much in line with Derrida’s intent.

Getting back to a postmodernism defined by skepticism instead of a total rejection of meaning, where does our time fall on that path, now that we’ve moved past postmodernism?

Tracing our approach to meaning is a legitimate and understandable way to note the history of modern thought through these three eras. The impact and influence of capitalism has also been suggested as an approach. I touched upon that when I said:

However, I’ve taken issue with this sentence of mine in the weeks since publication. The claim that metamodernism has hobbled consumer identity is based less on fact than hope. I believe it can and should lead us away from a dependence on consumerism as a replacement for meaning, but I don’t know that it has. I can’t even promise that it will.

The skepticism of postmodernism toward grand narratives had us defining ourselves by what we bought and owned, and I’d very much like to see a reduction in our dependence upon consumerism for a sense of self. Metamodernism won’t destroy it entirely, but it can allow us to move between consumerism and grander narratives of meaning.

Speaking of which…

One of the more difficult sentences in my article—and this time, I mean for me as a writer, not necessarily for the reader—was that metamodernism finds meaning in grand narratives while recognizing their constructed nature. I’m not sure what it means for a person of faith to believe in a religion that they think is a construct of man. It’s a meaning I’m attempting to explore, however.

Perhaps the answer is a belief in God which recognizes that much of what we use to approach Him is a creation of humanity. One of the errors of the church, in this approach, would be putting too much faith in the construct instead of in God.

I could attempt to discuss the ways that familiar focus has caused psychological harm, but that’s not the point of this article and probably beyond my current capabilities. These are questions I’ve asked, not answers to which I’ve arrived.

Let’s close this off with links to the ongoing discussion on metamodernism, and until next time…

—I’m Thaddeus Thomas

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The Republic of Letters

How Metamodernism Can Save Us All

Dear Republic…

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9 months ago · 108 likes · 32 comments · The Republic of Letters and Thaddeus Thomas

The Republic of Letters

Meta-Modernism In Action

Dear Republic…

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8 months ago · 64 likes · 22 comments · The Republic of Letters and A. A. Kostas

Chic-critique

A Vibe-Based Critique of the Substack Scene

I first encountered the word metamodernism while reading Thaddeus Thomas’ essay How Metamodernism Can Save Us All. Until then, I had never come across the term, but its promise caught my attention. It struck me as a potential alternative to two dominant forces shaping contemporary literature: the still-looming shadow of the traditional publishing world…

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8 months ago · 16 likes · 4 comments · Alexander Rivera

Burnt Tongue

Craft Pathology Report: Metamisframed

(Meme, me, Cult of the Rainbow Rat, FB, 2020something, fuck who cares…

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8 months ago · 31 likes · 11 comments · Emil Ottoman

Passion drives us to learn, and when your passion is writing, good lessons are both hard to come by and overwhelmed by a sea of misinformation. Eager to grow, we’re always learning, even when we what we learn is harmful. The wrong lessons can knock us back, undermine our better sensibilities, and rob our writing of power. When we’re desperate to learn, we’ll take any comment as gospel, even if it wasn’t offered as writing advice, even if it was offered as criticism of a summer popcorn flick.

One critic of Superman (2025) complained he couldn’t feel the tension when our hero fights the kaiju. Bystanders are unafraid and taking pictures. The action focuses on cute rescue scenes instead of the immediate threat. The critic seems to teach us that when the hero is fighting a monster, nothing must undercut the dramatic tension and rob us of the fear that the hero could die at any moment. He says bystanders should always run in terror, and a good writer would cut the nonsense with the dog and the squirrel. Let us feel real jeopardy.

It’s the wrong lesson.

One would certainly expect the lesson to apply in any fight with a giant monster in the heart of the city, but it fails to take into account the story being told. It assumes that there are cookie-cutter purposes that always apply to anything with matching surface vibes.

It would be easy to argue that the scene is world building. After all, the scene reminds us that heroes and monsters are commonplace in Metropolis. The complacency of the bystanders puts them at greater risk, but only because the fully expect Superman to protect them. They’ve been through this before.

That answer isn’t wrong, but it doesn’t explain the necessity of the scene nor the key role it plays in setting up the story’s central conflict.

What’s important here are two story beats juxtaposed against each other. Superman is about to learn, with the rest of the planet, that his intended mission isn’t to help mankind but to rule over it. To make this work, writer/director James Gunn sets up this key story point against the kaiju scene, which emphasizes Superman’s goodness. Superman’s objective is to protect the city and its inhabitants while capturing the monster for an intergalactic zoo or (if absolutely necessary) to euthanize the beast in the most humane way possible. This is set against the other heroes who don’t share this objective, who dispose of the monster cruelly, and who leave it up to Superman to make sure bystanders aren’t killed in the process.

The battle isn’t a story about strength but heart, and that’s important for the story’s central conflict.

If you received the critic’s feedback on the script and rewrote the kaiju scene to emphasize the danger Superman and the city face, you’d undermine the core conflict of your story. Instead of going into the dilemma having demonstrated the goodness of Superman’s heart, you would have emphasized his power, lining up your character with his newly revealed (and evil) mission—not against it.

It’s important that Superman saves the girl, the dog, and the squirrel. Set that within a kaiju fight, and you have something unexpected and fun to watch. Magnify that goal by having Superman want to save the monster, contrast it against heroes who lack that same compassion, and now you’ve helped us understand the character before the central dilemma reveals itself. His unwillingness to be a tyrant isn’t merely something said in a line of dialog. We’ve seen it played out in extreme circumstances.

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Interestingly, Man of Steel has a similar scene. This time, Superman (or Clark Kent, rather) finds a Kryptonian scout ship and through a holographic meeting with his father, discovers he’s meant to be a symbol of hope. This revelation is set against a series of non-linear scenes capturing both Clark’s wanderings as an adult, morally confused and uncertain, and his childhood with the Kents who taught him to protect himself by hiding who he truly is. We see Clark struggle against their teaching that he doesn’t owe anyone anything. We see him save people, despite all his earth father taught him, and this reveals his inner sense of hope, set against the conflicting morality of self-preservation.

One gave us an establishing dilemma before the clarity of who his birth parents intended him to be. The other gave us an establishing clarity before the dilemma of his birth parents’ intention. The former rose out of its conflict into a certainty that would drive its version of the man of steel, and the latter dropped its Superman out of certainty and into its central conflict of identity and purpose.

Fans of the character will argue over which represented him best, but that’s not the point here. We have examples of movies that mirror one another in many ways. One man of steel allows himself to be taken prisoner from a newly discovered place of clarity, and his incarceration reveals that he’s no man’s prisoner. The other Superman allows himself to be taken prisoner from a place of newly created internal conflict, and his imprisonment reveals that he’s more at man’s mercy than he ever imagined. Both of these come from contrasting story points with specific purposes, set against contrasting scenes to create the story’s sense of change and movement.

In the case of the kaiju, the purpose was to reveal character so that character could be juxtaposed against his calling. No scene, no matter what its aesthetics, has only one possible purpose. Stories are not cookie cutters.

I’ve used this quote before, but…

I’m a fan of story structure because I needed it. As a tool, it helped me deal with my weaknesses as a storyteller, but these days, I’m concerned that structure has become another cookie cutter, limiting the way we tell stories.

I don’t know that I’m right in my concern. My need to follow Kaufman’s advice may be another of my weaknesses. Maybe I’d do better with the cookie-cutter approach, and that doubt doesn’t surprise me. Kaufman himself obviously wrestled with it. The entire movie of Adaptation is based on that struggle.

But I came across an article addressing the strengths and weaknesses of Gunn’s Superman, and all the concerns centered on how the story strayed from what approved story structure was supposed to be. Look, however you approach story, whichever of Adaptation’s Kaufman brothers you identify with, I hope we can all agree that we don’t judge the cookie by the cutter.

Judge a story on its own merits, and that holds true for stories within stories. I don’t expect the kaiju scene in Superman to have the same purpose as any from Godzilla Minus One. We shouldn’t compare our stories’ scenes to vaguely similar scenes in other stories. Instead, we need to understand each scene’s place and purpose within the story and how it contrasts with the scenes juxtaposed against it.

That’s the lesson we should learn.

—Thaddeus Thomas

Recently, I’ve come to understand that doing so was the absolute right path, and more importantly, I now understand why.

As I considered the issue again, it occurred to me that I’ve been chasing the wrong rabbit. If we take the Jungian approach at face value, the unconscious is about archetypes. This brings to mind the famous quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, The Rich Boy:

The first sentence is the actual famous bit, but I wanted to share the greater context because it speaks to my error. It’s time for me to let go of this literary mysticism I held onto, seeing the unconscious as some wellspring of creativity. To the extent that the unconscious and conscious differ in that one focuses on types and the other on what makes us unique as individuals, if we focus on the former the latter will take care of itself.

The power of story comes first through what distinguishes us, and then the romance of the unconscious is that we find commonality on the most foundational level in the types buried there. If we write the individual, the connections between character and reader will forge themselves.

— Thaddeus Thomas

The question is: what?

Before I propose one such weakness, allow me to toss this hand grenade: The Judge from Blood Meridian was a moral creature, and I’ll explain why at the end.

An Emptiness in Contemporary Fiction

I enjoy a little study of philosophy, but moral philosophy bores me to tears.

I have an extremely religious background, but I’ve always been repulsed by Christian movies, to the point of a knee-jerk anger response when, as an adult, I continuously found myself compelled to sit through these films. It was so bad that I attempted a self-directed form of exposure therapy and spent a month watching them as my only entertainment, and in the end, found a few I actually appreciated.

This is my background, so when I say we’re addressing a fictional character’s standard of morality, understand that I mean none of this.

You might point out how something I discuss here relates to moral philosophy or religious storytelling, but that’s not where we’re coming from, what we’re aiming for, nor what we need to study to get where we need to be.

Morality in the real world isn’t the point, and the issues of the day have nothing to do with a fictional character’s morality unless that’s relevant to the story. This isn’t a self-insert. It isn’t preaching. It isn’t even philosophizing.

And I’m beginning to understand how underutilized but vital morality is in fiction. It’s that thing we sense is missing from contemporary fiction but cannot name.

What is Your Character’s Moral Standard?
What is Their Moral Dilemma?

Morality in fiction is a reasoned and consistent choice in response to a challenging circumstance. It might be the reason to do that hard thing, but it also might be the reason why doing something is hard—because it breaks a moral standard.

We might never see a character’s reasoning, but we see the actions. We see the choices, and we see that pattern of choices challenged at a key point in the story.

In Boule de Suif (Ball of Fat) by Guy de Maupassant, the main character is a prostitute in wartime, and she draws a moral line at (ahem) aiding and abetting the enemy. The point of the story isn’t whether it’s wrong to sleep with the enemy, but her moral dilemma is the climax of the story and highlights the hypocrisy that is the point of de Maupassant’s tale.

People talk a great deal about a character’s want and need, and in some cases, that discussion has mutated into a focus on the character’s dilemma. It’s a choice between sacrifices. You can only make the one choice, and something has to give.

That change might be an acknowledgement of what’s missing from our stories and characters: a non-emotional, reasoned conviction that is part of the story’s conflict and climax, whether that climactic solution is holding to the conviction or finding reason enough to break it.

However, I should treat the want / need / dilemma issue as something separate, although related. The need is likely to touch upon a character’s reason for breaking a moral code—or her want impacts her reason for holding to the cold, even though it costs her what she wants.

It’s not an emotionally based choice, either. The moral standard holds true no matter how she feels, but it’s challenged, for example, when holding to it creates a greater evil. Think of Huckleberry Finn struggling with the society-indoctrinated idea that assisting a runaway slave is a sin. He decides that helping Jim is the right thing, even if it sends him to hell.

Huck breaks that standard fairly early in the story, and that’s fitting for an outwardly imposed moral code, his rebellious nature, and the needs of the story.

We have moved away from characters having moral standards because of postmodernism’s stance on the grand narrative, but not only are we beyond the postmodern age, the moral stance need not have anything to do with our grandest of narratives like religion or country.

Think of how you grew up and your family’s stance on punctuality. It taught you a moral code, whether that being on time was a virtue or that people who worried about such things were uptight and repressed. Whichever way you were raised, that arbitrary point became a standard of morality, and then you married someone who was raised in that other kind of family.

The horror.

It would be a challenge to make a story where the moral dilemma was punctuality, but you get the idea. A moral certainty is an absolute in the character’s eyes, but that absolute need not be absolute to anyone else. Based on their history and influences, this is their reasoned stance and before it’s challenged within the story, it’s unflappable.

Unless, the character’s moral uncertainty is the point, and he fails to live up to a standard he believes in but can’t hold until the ultimate choice must be made and he lives up to the standard at the moment it costs him the most.

Maybe you’ll even find another approach.

And maybe there is no moral dilemma in your story. The character can still be driven by moral certainties, and that’s true of your main character and obstacle characters. If your character’s want is in conflict with his father’s moral certainty, there’s little room to argue out of that conflict.

Your character might be heroic, and her virtues are based on reasoned absolutes. Your character might be a villain, and her vices are based on reasoned absolutes.

Old-school morality has caused problems in the real world. Driven by errant “absolutes”, moral people do wicked things. The distaste for morality is near…absolute?…in our society, but that repulsion is a mirage. We all still have a sense of morality and absolutes whether we acknowledge them or not, but because we refuse to acknowledge them, we don’t acknowledge morality in our fiction either.

If you find yourself thinking there’s something missing in contemporary fiction, if there’s a weakness to a story’s central conflict compared to your favorite tales from days of yore—it may very well be that there’s something watered-down in a story whose sense of right and wrong is purely based on how it makes the character feel.

If there’s a chance this might be true, then its worth exploring as part of our push toward quality beyond that exemplified in traditional publishing. It’s a remnant of postmodernism that contemporary fiction needs to move past to reclaim its strength.

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The Morality of the Judge

Judge Holden is evil. Some think he’s the devil walking the earth, and to say that the Judge is a moral creature is to suggest that the devil himself is too. The very idea is repulsive.

But morality is about standards by which a person lives and by which they judge themselves justified. The Judge kills the boy because the boy offended his sense of morality, and as evil a man as he was, the Judge had a catalog of speeches explaining that morality.

That quote is a moral standard by which certain acts are not only justified by required. He doesn’t kill because of how he feels about you in the moment, at least, not usually. He kills because in his view of himself and the world, it wouldn’t be right to let you live—much as society would gladly see him hanged.

Morality is our attempt to live rightly in this world, but to be moral only means to be guided by a reasoned and absolute standard. It’s doesn’t mean you’re right. It’s doesn’t mean your good.

It doesn’t mean you’re not the devil incarnate.

—Thaddeus Thomas

For the rebels, here’s your chance to see it for yourself.

The focus of her video essay is fantasy, but don’t let that worry you if your neither read nor write fantasy. Taking our focus off of the genre concerns of the publishing industry is very likely one of the steps we’ll need to take if we are to…

Revolutionize Literature and use Substack to Do It

Hilary Layne gets one bit of publishing history wrong and tries to correct herself with subtitles added in the editing, but that didn’t quite get us there. The mistake was that she conflated the 1954 hardcover publishing of Lord of the Rings with the 1965 paperback publishing, and that difference is crucial in understanding the books’ success.

Publisher or author, I’m not sure which, but someone decided that The Lord of the Rings was above a paperback edition. Without that paperback, there would never have been the student obsession with the novels that then spawned the cultural obsession and after that the intellectual obsession.

When someone released a bootleg paperback, that created the urgency needed, and a genuine paperback release quickly materialized. The history of fantasy and publishing in general would have been significantly different without it.

The relatable point here is that there existed an accessible publishing form that seemed beneath legitimate publishing but was the key to birthing a phenomenon. The role that paperbacks filled in the 1960’s, might be played by Substack, today.

Beyond that slip-up, I trust that the rest of Hilary Layne’s history is correct because none of it just happens to hit some tidbit of publishing history of which I’m keenly aware.

The History of the Modern Fantasy Genre is the History of Modern Publishing

In the 1990’s Michael Moorcock and George R. R. Martin were central in a movement in fantasy publishing that positioned itself as the anti-Tolkien. There are attempts today to react against that reaction. The heart of Layne’s video essay points out that these are formulaic responses to a formulaic problem, one that wasn’t caused by Tolkien but Lester Del Rey.

Del Rey wanted to ride the coat-tails of culture’s obsession with Tolkien and created a formula for derivative material of various qualities that became the publishing model of Del Rey from The Sword of Shanarra through to The Wheel of Time. It’s success became the standard.

Side Note:

Please understand, that I’m not engaged in a take down of these books. I don’t know their quality because that was never my interest. I’ve read The Lord of the Rings but none of Del Rey books. It’s okay to love these books. That’s not the point. For me personally, I see myself as a fantasy writer, but I feel out of place standing in the fantasy isle of a bookstore. That’s just me being me.

On the other hand, I’ve read The Master and Margarita three times since discovering it in 1989. It’s my favorite novel.

The formula that Del Rey insisted upon was this:

Original novels. Invented worlds where magic works. A male central character who, with his innate virtue, triumphs over the forces of evil who were generally associated with technology.

Del Rey came at a time when the publishing houses had been purchased from the founding families by big conglomerates. Publishing had gone from focusing on the art to focusing on the business, and that’s what his formula was meant to capture. It worked.

Those who rebelled against the trend in the nineties inverted the formula to the same purpose.

Layne says the answer won’t be found in those trying to write the anti-Game of Thrones. It won’t be a response to the formulas but will rather ignore them.

It’s Not About Me

I’ll confess to the fantasies that darted through my mind as I watched the video. I wanted to be the publishing magnate that turned Substack into something profitable for fiction, but that’s already holding to the same problematic formula. It’s about me, and it’s about the buck.

Of course, writers need to earn from their work, but I’m not thinking of myself as the writer in that scenario. So let’s back up and start again.

It’s About the Work

We’re looking for a story to capture the imagination of Substack, and it has to be genuine. Suggestions are often made for catapulting a writer or a story into the Substack’s collective consciousness, but these ideas are usually artificial, planned out like any other industry push where the quality of the story is of secondary importance.

If there’s a formula or a response to formula here, it should be this. The dictates of the old publishing world are meaningless here. It’s not about associating ourselves with a genre but creating the best work possible. We aren’t creating the inverse of an old formula but seeking to create stories based on the needs and demands of that story.

Perhaps we’re doing that now. So… why have none of us taken Substack by storm? The answer’s obvious, but you’re not going to like it: our work has to be better.

Traditional publishing is its own worst enemy. We’re not going to get anywhere by comparing ourselves to that. We have to be better than traditional publishing. That’s a given. Ignore it. We have to be better than self publishing. That’s a given; ignore it.

By comparing ourselves to outdated, formulaic business models, we will only hinder our growth.

Substack becomes relevant when we focus on writing better than we’ve ever written before. That’s when Substack ceases to be an alternative means of consumption and starts being the new home of creative freedom. We’re so used to being artificially manipulated into buying whatever someone wants us to buy, we believe that’s the model we need to imitate. It’s not.

We must be authentic. We must be focused on the quality of the art. Fiction will be recognized on Substack when it deserves to be.

To be of comparable quality is to consign ourselves to anonymity.

How can we hope to achieve this when they have all the resources and full-time, world-class editors and entire teams dedicated to the production of a single book? Those systems will only ever produce a book of the quality it allows. We’ve been brainwashed into believing they’re better by virtue of being chosen.

We don’t have their resources, but we don’t have their limitations either.

At least, we shouldn’t have their limitations, but we’ve adopted their constraints as our own. We write within their prison walls because that’s the only freedom we’ve ever been allowed. Until that changes, nothing else will.

If we’re writing the equivalent of knock-off purses, we’ll never be better than the original. If we’re doing our own thing, we can go places and accomplish miracles the traditional published author never dreamed of.

But that’s a choice. One we each have to choose for ourselves.

And here’s where I depart from Layne. It’s not enough to ignore formula because it’s baked into us now. To ignore is to recreate it.

She’s right though, doing the opposite is to do the same. That puts us in a place where it can seem there is no escape.

If there’s interest, I can try to follow up with a few essays exploring how we challenge the narrative limits baked within us, but this isn’t about me. It’s about us as a community. We have to challenge this together and help each other recognize the old limitations and push past them.

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— Thaddeus Thomas

• Focus on character over plot.

• Edit out everything outside the story’s narrow focus.

• Stop over-explaining.

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A Character-Focused Outline

For an actionable tool, write a story outline but, instead of covering events that happen, focus only on your character’s arc. Hit all the important structural points but have all of them focused on your main character and her emotional reactions and motive-driven actions. How is she incrementally changed by each moment? Why is she propelled into her choice of action at the first plot point? Who was she at the beginning and who will she be at the end?

The midpoint is often a moment that asks a question the climax answers. What question does it ask about her character and how does the climax answer that question?

For immediate use:

Outline the scene(s) you’ll work on in the following assignments.

What is the character’s arc in this scene? What is her emotional journey? What do she want and why?

Each plot point in the three-act structure of her lunch at the diner becomes a part of her arc. She’s not just eating a cob salad, she’s confronted with obstacles, propelled by personal need, aiming for a desire goal, and headed straight into an emotional climax.

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Edit Out Everything That’s Outside the Story’s Narrow Focus

I’m not giving this to you as a universal law, but it’s a good habit to develop.

Take an older story and highlight everything that doesn’t build character, develop the world, deepen theme, or move the story forward.

I know it sounds like I’m trying to turn you into a minimalist, but that’s not my intent. When you max out, you’ll max out better, because you’ll know to put your words where they count.

When people talk about “killing your darlings”, this is what they mean. Save it in an inspiration file to be used in a story where it’s relevant. Don’t waste it here.

Characters, scenes, subplots, and lines are all subject to sacrifice when they don’t serve a narrative point to the story you’re telling.

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Don’t Over-Explain

Trust the reader.

If this is a difficulty for you, if you’re one to tell us a character’s emotion and tell us why she’s feeling that emotion, take one of your scenes and a rewrite to the bare minimum. Give us the least possible to understand who and where the people are and what they’re saying and doing. Then add the bits necessary, not for a mental understanding, but for an emotional response.

Build the scene back up to make the reader feel something.

When you’re done, give the scene to three beta-readers and ask them what they think the scene is lacking. Consider their responses. Save the meat. Discard the gristle, and then build the scene up with what you and your readers agreed it lacked.

You’ll be surprised at what your readers didn’t think was missing.

Most of the time, this error seems to come from a feeling readers need to understand something to fully grasp the character, and so the writer tells them. If what you’re saying is true of the character, it need not be told. The reader will see it in what the character does and says. If they don’t see it, then it’s not true.

That’s the heart of show, don’t tell.

I know that the previous exercise might accomplish this—but it might not. Your focus was different.

There you focused on irrelevant action and discussion. Here you focus only on what conveys the necessities of the scene and then on evoking an emotion from your reader.

It may well be that when you a) cut out everything that doesn’t build character, develop the world, or move the story forward; and then b) cut down a scene to the minimal required to show us who and where the people are and what is being said and done; you won’t have much of a scene left when you’re done. If that’s the case, it’s not an excuse to avoid the cut. You simply need to rewrite the scene so that those requirements are met.

Simply, he says.

— Thaddeus Thomas

P.S. -- You can “tell” points about side characters. Tell points. Show events, as someone once said.

These are generally points the main character believes to be true about other characters. That can be legitimate but should still be used with caution if showing is something you struggle with.

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My Character-Driven Pet Peeve

I mention this only because it’s true, but I’m not fighting this fight. The battle is lost. I surrender.

Character-driven and plot-driven stories are a factor of how genre and literary fiction work. When you focus on character over plot, you haven’t automatically created a character-driven story. Genre fiction is plot-driven. You can improve the story by focusing on the motivations of the main character and allowing everything the grow from there—but you’ve still written a plot-driven story. That’s okay. I’m not saying that character-driven stories are better, only that your story should spring out of the needs of your character and not “what happens next”.

So, if focusing on character doesn’t create a character-driven story, what does?

Consider any story. Is the focus external or internal? By internal, I mean that the majority of the word count is given to rumbling around in the character’s head rather than to the actions taken in his world.

Is the climax a victory won in the outside world or is it an epiphany that takes place in the character’s head, focuses on values, and is an emotional climax rather than a physical one?

Today’s essay is about creating character-focused, plot-driven fiction. Character-driven fiction is internal and its climax is an epiphany rather than an external action.

If you disagree, that’s okay. Social media doesn’t use the terms this way. I’ve given up the fight, but I thought it should be said.

— Thaddeus Thomas

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— Thaddeus Thomas

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I love ya, Kurt, but let’s clear up any confusion that quotes like this have created: in medias res is not your goal.

It’s not a magic pill that will make any story better. Nor is it about having an exciting opening. You can start with activity and interest without jumping deep into the story. In medias res is misused and misunderstood, largely thanks to movie executives and other story-adjacent people who don’t understand story.

Please note that I said “start with activity and interest.” That was very clever of me and I deserve applause, dammit. We usually say “start with action” and people associate action with violence and adventure. When you hear advice that tells you to put your reader right into the action, I want you to think activity and interest. Things are moving and there is a goal, not the eventual primary goal but a goal nonetheless, and whatever this activity is, it demands attention and holds interest.

In medias res isn’t an excuse to have a banger of an opening line.

There is no reason for true in medias res except as a structural choice, and that’s because it’s a dangerous choice. Popular story structures are popular for a reason. A road and a story both need structure to bridge the chasm between beginning and end. Mess with that structure, and your characters lack clear motivation, the story sags in the middle, and the road collapses.

In fact, in medias res is best justified when you realize your story is two bridges spanning the same gorge. It was a truss bridge and then changed to a suspension bridge. The change is awkward and jarring, and both bridges have complete structures all their own. The most pleasant driving experience would be to wake up (preferably as a passenger) where the bridges join. You experience half the gorge but the entire structure of the suspension bridge. If you missed anything important on the truss bridge, the driver can tell you about it on the way.

That metaphor is clear and requires absolutely no explanation, whatsoever.

So what is Kurt going on about with all that “start the story as close to the end as possible” nonsense?

The story is the crossing of the gorge, not the road that got us there.

Again, another absolutely clear and self-explanatory metaphor that requires no extra effort on my part. I’m on roll. I don’t even need to say anything more. Let’s just end this thing.

Start late; end early. Bye.

— Thaddeus Thomas

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When I ran my critique website, we had guests bless us with commentary in our occasional publications—thank Piers Anthony—or by visiting the forum and answering questions—thank you Homer Hickam.

Another author who visited had a three-book series published and was a regular contributor to Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, one of my dream publications. I don’t remember his name, but I remember something he said because I disagreed with it completely. When it came to structure, he said to skip the set up and jump into the action.

It sounds good, but it’s the same concept as an amplifier you can dial up to 11.

They’re re-releasing This is Spinal Tap. I’m assuming you know the references of my people.

The beginning is always going to be the set up. Always. The end of the dial is that system’s max, whether you call it ten or eleven. The beginning is the set up whether it’s slow or action-packed. Either way, you’re introducing the character, their world, their motivations, and the stakes. The reader doesn’t automatically know these things because of where you start, and that applies to in medias res.

The beginning is still the set up.

Most of the time, where we start our story is a question of a few feet difference on the road as it begins to bridge the gorge. Even if we miss a few seconds, we’re still on that passage of road from the cliff's edge to the first pier. (Those foundational pillars that support a bridge are called piers.) If we’re starting in medias res, our beginning is still the set up and requires all the usual work. Half the journey is complete—half the story is complete—but the new structure is just beginning.

Consider The Odyssey.

Much of the story’s set up is helped along by discussions among the gods about Odysseus’s fate, but the story begins ten years after the Trojan War. Odysseus has been trapped on the island of Calypso for seven of those years, and now that Poseidon is absent from Mount Olympus, Athena asks Zeus to let Odysseus begin his journey home.

The truss bridge began with the end of the Trojan War and stopped either with Odysseus’s arrival on the island or the end of his imprisonment there. You can tell a story with two bridges, and Virginia Woolf’s The Lighthouse could be described this way. She called it dumbbell, two big moments on either end connected by an abbreviated lapse of time. Homer could have structured him epic poem this way with two sea journeys connected by an abbreviated coverage of the seven years on the island of Calypso.

The Odyssey, however, begins when the new structure starts.

The poem begins with Odysseus’s son seeking news about his father. He’s twenty now and suitors are seeking his mother for marriage. We first learn about Odysseus’s trials second hand.

We pick back up with Odysseus as he leaves the island, is shipwrecked, and finally reaches the court of King Alcinious. There he recounts the tale of his travels. Then he returns to Ithica, kills the would-be suitors, and is reunited with his wife.

The Odyssey has its own complete structure, not half of one with us beginning at the jagged, bleeding center.

—Thaddeus Thomas

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It’s good to be back.

—Thaddeus Thomas.

I’ll begin with my most recent fascination, and though many of her works are spellbinding, I believe this song from a talent show six years ago is the perfect introduction. She was fifteen at the time, and I won’t tell you what makes her unique as that would defeat the point. Listen for yourself.

The song is short, making up only a little over two minutes of the video, but the video begins with the song and you can cut out when it’s done. There are versions that focus only on the song, but I wanted to link to Ms. Ankudinova’s official account.

The motherly voice I hear in the back of my head says, “You have such a pretty voice when you sing normally.” What pleases mother is when you sound like her favorite artist, in part that’s because she loves you and imagines you with the success, the glory, and that place in her heart the artist holds.

The reality, though, is there’s an endless supply of talented singers who can mimic mother’s favorite artist. They’re quickly forgotten, but if we focus on what makes us different, and if that difference highlights our talent, we have a chance of being heard and remembered.

It’s not the same as being weird for the sake of being weird, which was an artistic obsession of mine as a young man. Strange as a gimmick wears thin. We don’t need to see another dude, dressed like the devil, sing opera. That means for most of us, that legitimate difference might be minor, and that’s okay. The point is to express our talent through that which is truly us.

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Sometimes, however, strange can be a beautiful necessity.

What an amazing display of storytelling used to share personal trauma. The difficulties Ren shares at the end of the song were caused by Lyme disease, and it’s an ongoing fight. Ms. Ankudinova’s personal history has also become the stuff of legend, and if that’s not overtly the story shared by her song, it informs the dark change made to a previously bright Elvis Presley tune.

I assume the Hi Ren video is better known, but that’s really only because I’ve shared it before and have heard from fans who love Ren and this song in particular. Diana Ankudinova is a new discovery for me.

For this version of The Prayer by Marcelito Pomoy, I chose the live recording because it highlights that this is all him.

Now, mind you, some of us have sung like this all our lives. The difference is, he does it well.

This next one by Dimash Quadaibergen is also about six years old, and as I retrieved the link, I had to stop and listen to it all over again. Absolutely magical.

Now, maybe the only oddity here is range and a mastery of those high notes, and if I’ve strayed from the maverick to simply fabulous displays of talent, maybe there’s room to include this next classic, Postmodern Jukebox’s cover of Creep, featuring Haley Reinhart, but I’m going to argue for its proper inclusion.

I fought with myself over this one for a bit, thinking I only wanted to include it because it was an absolute obsession of mine and an obscene display of talent. However, I sought out Ms. Reinhart’s own work after this and couldn’t recapture the spark. Here we combine her talent with the quirkiness of Scott Bradlee’s arrangement to hit that maverick sweet spot, and together they become something unforgettable.

Hard to believe it’s been ten years.

We were granted a similarly magical combination when Jungle sought to make a dance video of their song Back on 74 and chose Shay Latukolan as their choreographer.

And sometimes the oddity is simply a genre you don’t pay much attention to, like beat boxing, that’s pulled off with such aplomb that you have to take notice, such as with Dopamine by Wing.

All of these are examples of viral videos, all of them introducing the artist to a much wider artist, and I don’t want to fall into the trap of analyzing what makes something viral. If we look at them as introductions to a body of work, however, I think it’s worthwhile to consider how often we became fans of a broader body of work.

Back on 74 introduced me to the dancer Will West, but my next great love of the dance style wasn’t him or the same choreographer. It was CDK’s video of Somebody I Used to Know, which captured a similar energy better than the follow up videos by Jungle.

Creep made me a fan of Postmodern Jukebox, especially everything they did with Haley Reinhart.

I’m not seeking out more Wing, and I might have listened to a second Dimash song.

I spent a week with Marcelito Pomoy, and a few months diving into the works of Ren.

I’m currently fresh in my obsession with Diana Ankudinova, but so far it hasn’t translated to her contemporary work. I am, however, thrilled with another older piece, her cover of Wicked Game:

It’s a battle for eyeballs as artists seek the attention and then the retention of an audience, and the bigger the initial grab, perhaps the more who follow along for the complete ride.

It’s the reason we’re talking about expressing our talent through that which makes us uniquely us, rather than slapping on strange for attention. Whatever grabs the audience, you want it to be something that leaves them needing more, a need they’ll find satisfied in your larger body of work.

That focus applies to all of us, viral sensations or otherwise.

—Thaddeus Thomas

Your turn for reading the stories will come, but for now, join me as I consider how to write flash fiction.

I am approaching these stories in a randomized order so that no one will know whose story I’m referring to at any given moment.

The article begins after a lengthy presentation on managing your account.

This article is part of Literary Salon issue #5.

If this project is something you don’t want to miss, make sure you’re subscribed to the Open-World Stories section of my newsletter. By toggling sections on and off, you choose what emails you want to get. The top level is the magazine that includes a review of the week, so you can catch up on anything you missed.

Manage Your Acccount

If you’re already subscribed, there have been times when emails, intended only for the authors, were accidentally sent to you. We’re moving those posts to author site for Franklin run by

What Emails Do You WANT to Receive?

You can manage any account by typing “/account” at the end of the address. I opened mine at Chrome Hearse Express by so you can see what a normal account page looks like. (Slightly edited for security reasons.)

There are no sections. You just choose if you want to receive posts and chat threads.

That’s a normal account.

This is what my account page for the Literary Salon looks like:

The top section is different because I own the publication.

Hmm, I wasn’t aware I’m not receiving my own Games posts. (I don’t post here often, but this is where I talk about creating board games.)

You’ll notice I have a Serials toggle, and later on, the various serials have their own toggles. The Serials section is meant to be a little introduction and table of contents. They go out very rarely, but give you a chance to decide if you want to receive the new serial. I highly recommend you keep this one on.

(As the owner of the publication, my account page doesn’t include a general unsubscribe button. Only push that button if you want to stop receiving the newsletter in its entirety.)

I don’t have some of the serials toggled on because they were complete serials—but now The Last Temptation of Winnie-the-Pooh is getting a new serialization, and I’d miss it. People have responded really well to this one. Be sure to catch it.

At the bottom of every account page is the following “Account Actions” box:

Manage Your Acccount

Pablo and I represent the two extremes. One reason I run my publication this way is because I tend to post often. You can opt-out of those emails that don’t interest you. Here are some possible variations you might consider.

• Weekly magazine reader: toggle off everything but the top level. You’ll receive the magazine post weekly, on Wednesdays, 3:30am eastern time. The magazine includes original material as well as links to everything I’ve shared through the week and links to some great work others are doing.

• The reader (only): If the material I produce for writers doesn’t interest you, you can receive only the reader-focused materials. You might want to limit yourself to:

  • The Literary Salon (magazine)

  • Serials

  • Short Stories

  • Flash

  • Substack Authors

  • Reviewstack

  • Re:Read

  • Open-World Stories

  • The serials of your choosing.

I’ll probably move where Open-World Stories falls on this list. It was originally intended as a section for the writers only, but as it is, over 1300 people are subscribed. We currently have 16 authors. We’re moving the author stuff to the Franklin newsletter, and when the first round begins, the first story will publish here. (You’ll have to follow the links to read more, choosing your own path through the stories.)

Thank you for subscribing,

Thaddeus Thomas

How to Write Flash Fiction

I love the satisfaction I get with a real ending, when a full story is told, which is really hard at this length. Twists are common in flash fiction, but they can often read like we’re being told a joke, not a story, and getting to that ending is tricky. By the rules of the game, you’re working with limited material.

One option is a dialogue heavy tale, simply told. This can run the risk of not being grounded and losing the reader in a lack of detail. Other flash pieces have no dialogue and more traditional prose. With a story carried by description, a brutal simplicity is less likely to work, and an indulgence of prose allows the reader to lose himself in the story.

Advice on flash fiction often focuses on cutting out words, and while cutting unnecessary words always works in any context, I’ve seen it taken too far. It’s been long enough that I think I’m safe in repeating an example from memory without risking the original author’s feelings.

The example was the phrase a cold wind from the north, and it was suggested that all cold winds come from the north so you can cut that phrase. So far, I’m interested. Most writing can be improved by looking for unnecessary phrases or phrases in the wrong order. Then the author went on to say that we can assume a wind is cold, so cut that, and we’re left with the simplest form: a wind.

Nope. I mean, if the character of the wind holds no importance then fine, but this isn’t great advice—at least not as illustrated. The point is to make our words count, and a snarling wind is not the same as a wind.

A cold wind is generic. A biting wind is too commonplace. Make those words count. A snarling wind suggests the noise and the threat of the bite, and it’s not something I remember reading before.

I was re-reading chapter three of The Last Temptation of Winnie-the-Pooh, and there’s a bath gag in there that relies on the old “it’s not even a Saturday” punchline. That’s a waste of words, and I’ll need to think of something else before that goes to book form.

Avoid common phraseology, but being common isn’t the worst sin. After all, it often slips by the reader unnoticed. It’s possible to make the problem worse by trying to fix it. First, don’t almost write a cliché. A near cliché is a still a cliché, only awkwardly written. Second, when we step away from the common phraseology, our original constructions can be clunky and hard to understand. We have to know what you’re saying.

I have a very brief article on figures of speech that was behind a paywall. Because of it’s potential usefulness here, I’m making it available to everyone.

Don’t confuse figures of speech with clichés. A figure of speech is a shared construction among many original statements. That common phraseology is a feature, not a bug. A near figure of speech is often just bad writing, written in a misguided attempt at originality.

For a helpful guide on figures of speech, I recommend The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsynth.

The first two stories I read for the project represented these two approaches. After considering what I’d read, my takeaway was that a very brief story requires that we ground the reader quickly. That way, if we have to be brutal in our economy, the reader doesn’t feel lost. Due to the brevity, it’s possible for our faults to be forgiven if the reward is great enough, but we can reduce the risk by grounding the reader well.

The third story was sweet and emotional, with no twist ending, just a resolution to the emotion of the moment. I thought something else was being set up, but it held true to the emotional core of the relationship being displayed and found no need to diverge into anything else.

I had to go back and re-read the fourth story. There’s a point in a story where it tells me what it is, and sometimes, nothing much clicks until I reach that point. I missed a few key points on the lead up, but once the story clicked into place, I was really enjoying it. Then the ending came, and I knew I’d missed something.

There are two points to make here. My missing an element can absolutely be seen as a me problem. However, it’s important to know where our stories come into focus for our reader. This is the moment that they understand the kind of story they’re reading and have an anticipation for the direction it will take. This in a point of investment for the reader, and until we have our reader invested, it’s easy to lose them.

There are other ways to hit a point of investment, and our stories can use more than one. A really interesting personality is an example. However, that moment the story clicks for a reader is the moment your reader know this is something they want to read. The characters, the situation, the stakes, and the genre become clear, and the reader straps in for the ride.

In flash fiction, that’s a long list for a very short story. These stories suggest that the most important element (outside of the ending) are the characters, their personalities and relationships. Jump right into a boldly presented personality that’s fun to explore. Give us that revelation of personality and let us see how the characters play off of each other.

Where the stories struggle, the brilliance of a character fails to shine through, and the story feels told rather than shown. I’ve written about the limits of the “show don’t tell” rule, but here I’m reminded how the problem is often in subtle word choices. When we move away from the specific to the general, we lose narrative power.

The following examples are my invention:

Several neighbors opened their doors to investigate.

That has a different feel than: Next door, Joe peeked out, just enough for me to see his scrutinizing gaze.

In my article on the rule, I made the argument for how the first example can work, but that relies on the author using the line to obliquely show us something that’s unstated. That’s not what’s happening here. It’s just a line of action, and especially when these lines follow one after another, specificity is key. Avoid group nouns and show us a specific example.

The difference is witnessing vs. understanding.

In one otherwise brilliant story, there’s much work done to make sure we understand. We’re grounded, but too grounded. We need to move into the key relationship sooner and highlight one or both personalities. The backstory should be revealed in that interaction rather than being told up front, and finally, we need language focused on the specific, not the general.

Clarity is important, but we want that clarity in what we experience rather than what we’re led to understand.

Stories with this problem remind me of an art class I had in seventh grade. We were instructed to draw a shoe, and the impulse we had to fight was to draw our understanding of a shoe. Our understanding of a table, for example, is a flat surface with four legs, and young children will draw all four legs, no matter how abstract the picture has too become to represent them all. If we draw what we see, the table or the shoe is simply the object before us. We draw that—not everything we know the object to be.

As Thomas De Quincey said in On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth:

If a character is on a mountaintop, we don’t write about our understanding of that fact. Instead, we sit with our character and write what we see, hear, and smell. A story is not us sharing our knowledge of what’s happening. We put ourselves into the moment, experience it, and write that experience.

Some of these changes can be made in extremely complicated ways that destroy and rebuild a story, but sometimes, it can be resolved with a few choice words, like moving from the general to the specific. Another (unrelated) word-choice edit is to watch for the use of the word “had”. Cut it unless it’s absolutely necessary, and if it’s needed, chances are, it’s only needed once. You can return to a simple past tense on the next verb.

Writers often say a character “had” done something, because they, as writers, are in a mental moment where the action is already done. They’re thinking the action is five seconds in the past, but in the story, the action is immediate. Your mental position within the story as an author is key to sharing the experience, but it’s also an imaginary construct that doesn’t really exist for your reader. It shouldn’t determine your verb tense.

That’s an abstract idea but really important. Keep your action immediate wherever possible.

The “had turned” problem is a past tense issue. In present tense, instead of translating to “has turned” the problem often shifts to “is turning.” Cut “she is turning” and write “she turns.” More to the point, you can survive doing this once, but it’s an addictive construction, and present tense stories become a thicket of “is turning,” “is seeing,” and “is smiling.” Soon, the reader “is pulling his hair out.”

As I sit with this final, beautiful story, I want to send a note to the author letting them know that one detail is repeated twice, and it’s a repetition that doesn’t work. Also, there’s a direct statement of the character’s revelatory understanding that can be cut. The lines that follow will reveal the same information in a way that allows the reader to discover the reveal for themselves. Otherwise, this is really good and has all the points we’ve discussed so far—except, many of the strong endings are twists, and this story’s twist is stated in that “revelatory knowledge.” The rest of the story if the emotional impact of that reveal, which makes it that much more important that the reader not be told before they’ve discovered the truth for themselves.

The story, though, is really well done.

— Thaddeus Thomas

Read my essays on Prose Style and Literary Theory here.
The book version is coming soon.

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This time, I attempt to write:

The Truest Essay I Know

This article is part of Literary Salon issue #4.

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Looking for a fresh new Author Newsletter?
Find a new author and get a book as a welcome present.

In addition to my authors’ broad spectrum of genres and styles, for this promotion, I asked for cozy mysteries, Romance, and LGBTQIA+ books. (Elsewhere, I said this promotion wasn’t intetionally opened to Romance, but I’ve double-checked and that statement was wrong. Their inclusion wasn’t a happy accident. They were invited.)

Before we move on to other sources in the pursuit of perfecting the non-fiction art form, I want to return to Larry McEnerney and the construction of our sentences. He scoffs at our rules for active and passive voice and says, instead, that the sentence’s focus should be on the cares of the reader.

Art Cuts Those Who Wield It

Last time, we took as our example my first essay on prose style, and my newsletter was the focus in that original paragraph. Readers don’t care about my newsletter. They’re happy if my writing provides value, but they can find that value elsewhere. The newsletter is important to no one but me.1

In the rewrite, the focus became the reader.

That’s a fundamental failure of much of our non-fiction writing. We’re wrapped up in what’s important to us instead of what’s important to our readers.

Whatever your readers care about, whatever motivates them and holds their attention, that’s your focus. We absolutely write about what we care about! That’s where passion come from. The point of focus isn’t the subject matter but in how we present it, and we can present our passions with a focus on the interests of the reader.

When McEnerney talks about focus, he means sentence construction. Stress is placed upon the end of a sentence, indicating importance, but the focus of the sentence is its subject. When working with academics, he has them circle every subject and then asks if that’s what’s important to the reader.

Let’s apply that exercise to my writing:

Art cuts those who wield it, and as a fiction author, I reject essays as art in order to spare myself the pain. I publish too quickly in search of that serotonin high and too glibly out of a sense of obligation, and that which is not art is rendered garbage. If success matters, greatness must be the goal. My essays must become art.

Perhaps you and I are the same. If so, if you bleed over your fiction, then my first advice to us as essayists is that we must again be willing to bleed–both from the effort and from the cruelty of the truest sentence we know.

Soul gives life to our fiction, but I imagine that soul belongs to my characters and not my prose. It does not. Those paragraphs consist not of fingers and toes but of words, only words, and from those words a soul emerges.

It can live here as well, quickening every line, allowing them to dance and fly. The freedom of fiction feels foreign to the essay but only because of the lies school taught us. We no longer write for a teacher but for an audience who trusts us to bring value, not homework.

We are Frankenstein, come to give life to the lifeless. We are Duchamp, come to turn trash into art.

These words come from this essay, opening paragraphs written in this attempt to seek improvement, and I’m not sure if they turned out better or worse for the effort. I’ve cut them, leaving them only here, and would love your thoughts on the difference in style between these lines and those that remain.

In the first paragraph, some of that focus is on myself, and it's not until the second paragraph that I move that focus to the reader. I knowingly ignored that reality because in my first attempts, the subjects were the reader or a generalized abstraction. To write the truth and attempt to capture some of the spirit that exists in our fiction, I began instead with myself as the essay’s “protagonist”.

Otherwise, the focus of that first paragraph is art, greatness, and essays. The first two, at least, matter greatly to my readers, and my argument is the importance of the third.

For those of us who desire to improve, I thought that spoke to the heart.

And yet, I’ve been presented this counterpoint: maybe there’s nothing wrong with my essays. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with yours.

A friend reached out to me with kindness and advice, saying:

“Lemme guess. You’re at the point in your ADHD swing where you’re panicking about having scheduled too much, and so you’ve convinced yourself, again, that rigid discipline and hard lines are the solution to feeling like you’re drowning? And you’ve done this with the caveat that THIS time it will work because THIS time you really, really mean it? Am I in the ballpark?”

If we’re talking about my essays, I didn’t think that’s the issue. I just want to be better.

“I don’t think it’s your essay issue. I think it’s *your* issue. I think it’s why you keep ignoring pivot points in favor of ‘IT MUST BE HOW I FIRST IMAGINED OR I FAIL!!!’ It’s why the tone of your notes is subtly shifting from confident to frenetic.”

But… well… I…

Write the truest sentence you know.

That energy you saw might have been the promise of a new series blowing away the gathering mists of depression. The decision to improve our non-fiction hit me like I’d injected inspiration directly into my veins—which, in honor of the truest sentence, is probably that old one-more-thing-added-to-the-pile-will-be-the-answer syndrome.

It’s addictive.

Mental health moments aside, though, here’s a reality. I’ve seen those essays the heavy hitters post. My non-fiction work isn’t that good, but (dammit) we’re writers. We can do this. I just need to know how to get there.

I’ve come so far in the last year, and I’m not done yet.

So, what’s the solution? It might partially be Larry McEnerney. It might not be, but I believe in the power of the essay to bring us a larger audience; I believe that better quality helps bring a bigger audience. Finally, I believe that improvement takes time and effort.

Your essays aren’t garbage. My essays aren’t garbage, not even that last one that was posted too soon.

But they can be better. They will be better.

—Thaddeus Thomas

P.S. — I’ve returned to my mantra that “the one rule of Substack is that no one cares,” and I’ve decided it’s wrong. It was probably true for me back when I started saying it, but this community has been truly supportive.

Write the truest sentence you know.

By wrong, I mean it’s wrong to say. It gives the wrong idea, the wrong impression, and is likely more an exhibit of depression than anything else. The underlying concept underlying these words has merit—but I have True-Fan subscribers who took on the extra cost because they spent so much time working through my prose-technique archives that they felt they owed me.

That’s this thing right here:

Those readers have demonstrated that they care. Others demonstrate the same in other ways, and I dishonor all that through my lack of clarity.

I will find a better way to express my thoughts. Thank you for the love of this community. I don’t deserve you.

An Improvement in Quality

In Wednesday’s newsletter, a new series began that explores how we can earn more readers by improving our non-fiction. I’ll include that mini essay We Must Write What’s Valuable below, after which, I’ll continue with new material.

But first, as I said in a recent note:

An improvement in quality is the most honest path to growth.

We Must Write What’s Valuable

Originally presented in Literary Salon #3.

The University of Chicago has a program that teaches academics how to write, not the students but the professors, and when you ask yourself what Story Club with George Saunders is doing that we’re not doing, it’s the same thing taught by the Chicago program. In his most recent post, answering a reader’s question about hope, Saunders follows the University of Chicago’s line of thinking. For all the good work that we do, for all the wonderful fiction and all the thoughtful essays we produce, if George Saunders and the University of Chicago are in agreement about what makes for good writing, maybe we should pay attention.

Saunders knows his readers. They write to him, and he knows the problems they’re interested in solving because they tell him. He addresses the problem by telling his readers what wonderful, smart people they are, and then he shows them the instability in their current situation and brings them out of that instability to a point of stability. As Sean Connery said in The Untouchables, that’s the Chicago Way.

“What an interesting question…” You’re so smart and clever.

“There are a few embedded assumptions in the question we might want to unpack a little.” There’s an instability in your thinking.

That’s Saunders demonstrating that his writing is valuable. He identifies a problem that’s important to his readers, and he sets about to change how his readers think about that problem.

To determine if this instruction for academics has any value for Substack essayists, especially those whose focus is fiction and literature, I looked up the most successful literature Substacks, chose one, and went to the most recent post.

What is George Saunders doing that we’re not doing?

He’s not writing to share his thoughts. As the program’s director, Larry McEnerney says, your teachers were paid to care about what’s in your head. They taught you to write to reveal your thinking so they’d know you understood the material and could grade you accordingly. That instruction was helpful to them but deadly to your ability to write with power.

If we don’t learn the difference between what we write and what the masters of the craft write, we’ll always struggle for readers, because we’re fishing with bad bait. You can’t hook a reader with bad bait. List your hopes, dreams, and all your reasons for being here. Name them. Every single one begins with hooking a reader.

Readers care about what’s important to them, and when you present a fault in their thinking and back it up with an argument, now you have more than their interest. You’re making an impact.

We’re going to make a bigger impact on more people, starting today.

—Thaddeus Thomas

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The Most Honest Path to Growth

Yes, you’ve practiced your fiction until it’s perfect, but that hasn’t translated into your non-fiction. What’s the difference between what you write and those essays that have people falling over one another to read them? Larry McEnerney knows.

Your entire school career, you wrote for an audience that was paid to read your writing and who used your writing to judge your knowledge of a subject. None of that means anything when you’re no longer a student. Instead of paying to be read, you want to be paid, and your reader doesn’t care what you know. They have their own problems, and valuable writing addresses the reader’s need.

The good news is that McEnerney’s program for academics makes me believe that with a few minor adjustments, we can take our current writing and make it valuable.

McEnerney’s clients are experts in the subjects they write about, and for most of them, writing is part of the thinking process. When they’re done, they have a thoroughly considered point, but they haven’t yet created something their readers will understand is valuable. That’s where the Chicago way comes in: the flattery, the problem, and the argument; but in academia, these points aren’t obvious like they would be in ad copy. With our essays, we can apply McEnerney’s concepts and preserve the fundamental nature of how we write.

We can, that is, unless you’re following the rules you learned in high school. We’re throwing all that out the window.

Thesis statements? Forget about it. Tell your reader what your essay is going to be about? Nonsense. Useless. Detrimental.

When you tell what your essay is going to be about, you’ve already excluded the reader. You’ve not made it about them but about yourself and your precious writing.

When you tell what your essay is going to be about, you’ve already excluded the reader. You don’t open with a thesis statement but by revealing the reader’s problem.

Let’s look at the opening of the first essay I wrote on prose style and see what can be done to apply this strategy:

In this newsletter, you can find stories where I’ve had to mimic the styles of other writers. This includes the serials The Last Temptation of Winnie the Pooh and Kraken in a Coffee Cup, the latter of which is largely made up of shuffled passages from Moby Dick and tells the tale of a ship that sails beneath the seas, claiming the souls of drowned sailors. One key factor in making these projects work is mirroring the original author’s style, but that’s not the only reason such an exercise in style is useful. In studying their style, we learn to expand our own.

Now, by my standards at the time, this was a very successful essay. It launched a series and changed my entire experience of Substack. I’m thankful for what this writing did for me, but to get to where I want to be, I have to do better.

If I look at this paragraph through McEnerney’s lens, it’s a mess. I’m obsessed with myself, and it’s not until the final sentence that there’s a hint of the reader. Today, I might lead with that sentence:

In studying the style of the classics, we learn to expand our own. As a writer, you’re well read. You’re current with contemporary fiction, but it’s heavily flavored your voice, and you’re wondering how the works of the world’s great writers might teach you some of the old magic that today’s writers forgot. In my writing, I’ve often had to mimic the styles of the classics. This includes…

The flattery: you’re well read.

The problem: today’s writers, of which you’re one, have forgotten that old magic.

The argument: I’ve often had to mimic the styles of the classics, and because of that, I have the answer to your problem.

You’ll notice that none of this is over-the-top, and some of it is only suggested. I didn’t have to rewrite the whole essay, either, but I approached it with the reader in mind. I showed them the value.

To challenge this idea further, I returned to George Saunders, but his work is mostly pay-walled. I then searched for great essays on literature, and at the top of a short list was On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth by Thomas De Quincey.

His first short paragraph describes his emotional experience and confusion over the knocking at the gate. Then, the following opens his second paragraph:

Here I pause for one moment, to exhort the reader never to pay any attention to his understanding, when it stands in opposition to any other faculty of his mind. The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind, and the most to be distrusted; and yet the great majority of people trust to nothing else, which may do for ordinary life, but not for philosophical purposes.

Problem: your understanding gets in the way of grasping truth and reality and therefore, you have failed to embrace this moment in Shakespeare’s play. (For his reader, the failure to grasp an aspect of Macbeth is a serious problem, indeed.)

Argument: this passage is followed with the example of how we fail to draw perspective (unless we’ve been trained) because we draw from our understanding instead of what we see.

The essay was first published in the October 1823 edition of The London Magazine, and aside from the lack of flattery, it follows McEnerney’s points.

Not Every Popular Essay Clearly Follows This Vision

When they don’t, I do find myself struggling more with the question of why am I reading this? If a reader can’t answer that question, they stop reading. Sometimes, the reason for reading is simply the parasocial relationship they’ve built with the author.

Sometimes, however, just because the vision isn’t clearly present, doesn’t mean most of the elements aren’t there. They aren’t clearly present in the academic articles they create, unless you know what you’re looking for.

Perhaps you remember the Elysian article No One Buys Books that went viral. I do—and it’s surprisingly hard to remember and find posts that went viral, which I very much want to do for this series! I returned to the article to examine it through this lens.

Again, no flattery. The less your essay’s beginning openly confronts the thinking of your reader, the less necessary this becomes, I suppose. Otherwise, it works like an open-faced compliment sandwich.

The problem is buried, but I think I know why. This is the context of the article: Publishers attempted to merge, but the government brought an antitrust case against them, and this is what we learned because of it. Her readers are going to be writers hoping to break into the business, struggling published authors, and readers. Those are vastly different populations, and the problems this article addresses for each of them are not the same.

The one place the problem is most clearly stated is in the title. No One Buys Books. The article is the argument behind the title.

There Will Be Other Ways

Solving the reader's problem isn't a universal model. For me, the biggest points are:

1. school messed up your writing, and

2. focus on what interests the reader.

The problem-solving essay is one approach to that focus, but it won't be the only one.

We’ll focus on focus in the next essay.

—Thaddeus Thomas

Poor, poor story patterns, separated from their family and dying in the wasteland. It’s heart breaking, really.

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Deeper Stories

Every now and then, a writer who packs his dialogue full of philosophical or political tangents will say that his work is too deep for the average reader. Now, that kind of thing can work—though it often doesn’t—but if that were depth, we’d all be in trouble by the time we wrote our second novel. Luckily, themes come to our rescue once again.

First, your themes will keep you focused, and if you’re focused, you can’t say everything that comes to mind. Some of those ideas get saved for another story.

Second, themes grant you a super power. It’s one of the few times you can repeat yourself and sound smarter for it.

Third, those themes will take all the other aspects of prose and storytelling and use them to create depth—no philosophical treatise required.

Though we’ve covered many possibilities, the first component your theme will need is clarity. Your reader needs to understand the characters, their situation and relationships, and the action that results. It’s easy to think great writers write to obfuscate their meaning; after all, sometimes we get lost as readers, and if the writer has a great reputation, well then, to be misunderstood is to be great. No?

No. Not really.

Let’s remember why Cormac McCarthy removed all that punctuation. He thought he was bringing clarity to his storytelling. To be great is to seek to be understood.

Literary flourishes exist in literature, but more often than memory would suggest, those flourishes are used at the right moment, surrounded by passages of clear prose.

You can write in whatever style you choose, and your intent with your prose can be literary or balanced, but the writing should be free of rudimentary errors. Clean prose and clean storytelling are both aspects of clarity. Don’t get in your reader’s way.

Style and quality can give a cosmetic appearance of depth, but they can also allow you to say more than if you weren’t developing your prose so intentionally. Where these aspects create patterns, whether we call those patterns themes or motifs, we are building the structures of purpose and meaning.

With clarity, the conflicts that illustrate your theme will be understood, or at least interpreted through the mental lens of the reader, and those conflicts (those relationships, challenges, and thwarted desires) have direction. They point to something, and because of the centrality of theme, those literary arrows all point in the same direction, illustrating a point with repetition and contradiction, revealing the story’s heart.

Groundhog Day

If we wish to understand Groundhog Day as “high concept”, its central idea is that a grumpy weatherman gets stuck repeating one day, every day—Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney Pennsylvania, the worst gig in the business. (If you’re unfamiliar with the term, high concept simply means that an idea is easily summarized, memorable, and commercially appealing.) In considering Groundhog Day thematically, however, we need to ask ourselves where those ideas are pointing.

Before I continue, let me remind you that the final meaning of a story is something that the writer and the reader construct together. The writer will offer several intentional components that all work together to indicate what he believes to be the purpose and meaning of the story, but the reader will often arrive somewhere close but not exactly where the author intended.

In the case of Groundhog Day, the creative team received letters from representatives of several faiths, each thanking them for so clearly illustrating their faith’s core philosophical concept of the meaning of life. That’s an accomplishment, and it’s not a fault in the mind of the reader that he’s “missed” the intended meaning. Story patterns and the reader’s life patterns work together to create a unique reading experience and therefore, a unique meaning.

The direction the creative team gave that high concept is what focused them on the themes they chose. It’s what created the shape of meaning that their viewers filled in with so many variations, but it takes a while to get there. In the beginning, the situation is basically what one would expect, and these are the elements that get repeated in its lesser imitations: Phil gets stuck repeating the same day. It’s a situation he denies and struggles against, until he embraces the idea that he can do whatever he wants. He manipulates the world around him to meet his needs, but eventually he realizes what he really needs is Rita, the producer who came to Punxsutawney with him.

Here’s where the story finds its direction. Phil can’t manipulate Rita to get what he truly desires, which allows for the building of the love story, but just as important, when that fails, life loses its purpose, and Phil kills himself repeatedly, only to return every morning. The failed suicide attempts lead him to declare that he’s a god, and that leads into his attempts to save the homeless old man who dies that day, every day, no matter what Phil does. He’s not a god.

We don’t know what happens in Phil’s mind because of that, but we see him inspired to learn the piano. And ice sculpting. And if he can’t save the old man, he does what he can around town to help people in whatever little ways he can. He doesn’t become a god, but he becomes a better person. That’s what wins Rita’s interest and then her love.

The high concept is that a man has to relive the one day he hates most. The thematic direction is that he hates the day for shallow, egotistical reasons, and by reliving this one day, his god-complex is magnified and then shattered, leaving him humbled and able to become a better person—a lovable person.

Your reader doesn’t need to be able to articulate all that, but they’ll sense that the meaning is there. They’ll know you’ve given them a story with meat on the bone, something they’ll be digesting long after the final page is turned.

Avatar

I’m not breaking down Avatar.

I bring it up because a comment about the movie in Notes (Substack’s social media platform) reminded me of a story, and that story gave me the final inspiration I needed to write this essay.

There’s a story-process expert on Youtube whose method focuses on having every character represent a different approach to the central theme. It’s an interesting concept, and I’d listened to several of his videos by the time he realized that Avatar was written like it had followed his program.

He kept pushing that the story was really good actually because every character represented a different take on the themes of environmental protection and imperialism. The effort to celebrate the script in order to justify his process fell flat and, instead, demonstrated the limits of how far such a program could take you.

My mother loves Avatar. I want Zoe Saldaña in all the roles. As I told someone recently, the movie is fine and the effects were groundbreaking. What it isn’t is an example of a great script or even an original one, and it certainly isn’t a shining beacon of what we hope our stories to be.

The expert always pushed that if a character didn’t represent a different approach to the theme, the character didn’t belong in the story, and I could make an argument for that being true. To do so, however, we’d have to stretch farther than simply compiling all the possible attitudes one could have about the central theme of Groundhog Day and assigning one to each character.

Rita tells Phil he’s not god, but the character who represents that facet is the homeless man, and the question is never raised. His death is a foil to that reasoning. The bowling buddies (I’m doing all this by memory) introduce the concept that Phil can do whatever he wants. The question is literally raised and answered. The cameraman, played by Chris Elliott, becomes an example of a man who hasn’t changed, the contrast highlighting Phil’s journey. The insurance man, Ned, highlights what a horrible day this is, as does Mrs. Lancaster. (“Oh no, there wouldn’t be [any hot water] today.”)

Nancy… Nancy Taylor!? represents how Phil can manipulate to get what he wants but not what he truly needs. Phillis, the waitress who wants to see Paris before she dies, and the gay waiter represent the unfulfilled desires carried within all of us, desires that won’t be met if we don’t make a change. The Groundhog Day head honcho (whose name I don’t recall but who was played by Bill Murray’s brother, Brian Doyle-Murray) and others represent Phil’s transformation by the change in their reaction to him.

In Avatar, the characters literally have the different attitudes toward the theme that the Youtube expert demands, and for some stories, that’s fine. More often than not, however, theme is expressed not in a character’s philosophy but in their relationships and actions or just how they confirm with or contrast against the progression of the protagonist.

We aren’t writing a round table where people take turns stating their arguments. Theme is less often expressed through opinion than it is through action, and by action, I mean the living out of one’s life in the moment and in the context of the other characters. Earlier, I used the word conflict, and by conflict I don’t mean battle but confrontation between opposing desires, even between people who are attempting to cooperate with one another.

And finally…

Meaning isn’t found in saying something profound in one line somewhere in your story. It may be a great line, but it will feel out of place unless it’s part of the story’s thematic pattern; it’s those patterns that give a story a sense of meaning and purpose.

—Thaddeus Thomas

PS. — This bit of trivia I had to look up to keep my facts straight. In 1990-1991, Brian Doyle-Murray and Chris Elliott starred in the sitcom Get a Life, and when Charlie Kaufman talks about his early days as a sitcom writer, Get a Life was the first of these, for which he wrote two episodes. The first is Prisoner of Love, which I’ve included here. I saw the show (if not the episode) back in the day and remember it as surreal. Today, I think it would be called intentionally cringe.

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If you haven’t read the original, unbutchered version of Such was the Epiphany of Theodore Beasley, I highly recommend it, and the author’s a decent fella, too.

He broke the law by being angry.

Our interest is technique, but a little discussion of background and meaning seems appropriate. A few days before I began work on the story, my daughter told me about a law in our state. Open carry is legal as long as you’re not angry. Now, I can understand the reasoning behind the law, but on the face of it, it’s still funny.

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Now, let’s discuss: Theodore Beasley.

The law allowed Theodore Beasley to carry the gun—which was the only name he knew for the gun, except to believe it couldn’t be a revolver as it lacked any mechanism to revolve—allowed, as long as he carried it openly, which he supposed he’d achieved, with the brown leather holster attached to his snakeskin belt, and as long as he wasn’t angry, as if this weapon of deadly intent rendered every wielder a pacifist who came in peace with guns a blazing, killing you with joy. Smile, motherfucker. Smile.

I didn’t have a story in mind, just our amusement over the law. That gave me a first sentence. Then what? Time for truth in fiction: I don’t know much about guns, and the first sentence required this was going to be about a gun. Normally, that meant research, but I decided to write the truest sentence I know. I don’t know guns so neither does my character.

I went for a long second sentence. It’s not a cumulative sentence, I don’t think—once you get away from building with adjectival phrases, the distinctive appearance blurs a bit—but I did focus on the Landan’s advice that long sentences move in steps.

I cap it off with a diacope and a cuss word, and I don’t think you understand how uncomfortable a choice that was. The discomfort made it all that much more important.

As for the diacope, these figures of speech are surprisingly important because they sound right to us. They’re pre-existing forms that carry the weight of good writing. Part of me rebels at that idea, but if we avoid the forms but come kind of close, it reads like music that didn’t quite hit the note. Instead of making our writing more sophisticated by avoiding the patterns that were patterns back with Shakespeare used them—play with those patterns. Give your reader that recognizable handhold as they climb your mountain of text.

If only he could smile and hide the torrent of pain and humiliation throbbing within his ruined face and betraying his indignation at the dignity he’d been denied, not once but always. Always.

Indignation at the dignity is a polyptoton, a repetition of words from the same root. Once I tied that off with the alliteration of denied, it created a phrase that made my ears happy. Speaking of alliteration, maybe your high school teacher told you, like mine did, that it’s only alliteration if the words are side-by-side. I hope not, because that’s just not true, but even if it were, we’re not building a tongue twister. We want a sentence where the words sound like they belong together, creating musical phrases that are woven together within our little symphony. This particular phrase felt like it needed some punctuation at the end—and that punctuation was the repeated word. Always.

He could trace back life like a timeline, one infraction to the next, and anyone with such a view would see the same as he, the relentless apathy he’d engendered, the rejection of those who’d weighed his soul and found him wanting. Today he’d end the question, prove them right, and cut short his days in a blaze of ignominy, not of glory and of no surprise, for all who knew him would have seen this day coming.

Here begins the philosophical through point about how emotion lies to us and gives us a view of our lives as a series of emotionally similar events. I was living on the bayou in Mississippi when I had that particular revelation, and it helped me gain control over my thoughts instead of the other way around. Since my character is clearly giving into his thoughts, I went with every gut-wrenching insecurity that ever haunted me: relentless apathy.

That just hurts.

He stood his ground before the damned and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened, and before he could understand why nothing happened, a uniform tackled him to the ground and held him there until the police arrived.

Where is all this taking place?

I can point to my essay on grounding the reader with the W questions and what’s necessary when you leave the reader temporarily ungrounded, but this wasn’t an intentional application. When I first wrote this, I simply didn’t know. Normally, once that’s figure out, you’d go back and ground the reader, but I decided to keep it unknown and only hint at the location later in the story.

For two sentences, we have action without place, until the reader is given the luxury of the backseat of the cop car as something to hold onto. It’s a dangerous move. I’ve had one reader point out the lack of location in the comments. If you do this, be warned.

Handcuffed in the backseat of a cruiser, he watched them laugh among themselves, wiping tears from the corner of their eyes and glancing furtively in his direction, dedicating to memory all the details they’d tell at home and to their friends at parties for years to come, until their children rolled their eyes as well-rehearsed words tumbled out with premature laughter, asking, did I tell you about the gunman who couldn’t…

Couldn’t what? He couldn’t even say, still not understanding what went wrong, not with his moment nor with his gun, but he could say what went wrong with his life and count off the steps, one-by-one, not knowing that even in that, he was wrong.

Here we return to Theodore’s insecurity. This isn’t the viewpoint of an objective narrator. That’s Theodore’s paranoia speaking. We’re indirectly in his head, seeing the world as he sees it, and the importance is that it avoids the issues of flow that come with a shift into first-person thoughts.

We can make that shift, but you really need to watch how the sentences flow. Otherwise, it’s like tripping on mismatched blocks of sidewalk. Your reader may not fall, but a jarring break of flow will make them stumble.

He wouldn’t see he was wrong until his twelfth group session with skinny Mr. Rimsdale, the prison’s once-a-week counselor, and then Theodore would see it all, all at once, and break down weeping with tears and snot and trembling, which the others would see and tell—and for which he’d be beaten in the prison laundry and sent to the prison infirmary and from there to the hospital and the ICU, where for several days he’d hope he’d die.

Such was the epiphany of Theodore Beasley.

Someone suggested to me that these last two paragraphs were rushed, and while that’s intentional, it won’t work for everyone. I’m ripping through a preview of events. The reader doesn’t know what location he tried to shoot up, only that he was stopped and arrested, and then in a future-tense single sentence I outline Theodore’s half of the story. It’s an unusual structure, and I’m depending on a couple of things to maintain your interest. One, the sentences move. As long as I don’t lose you, this should read quickly. If so, maybe I’ve told you enough by the end of the section to make the mystery of the unknown worthwhile.

A writing instructor said that if you want to capture the human experience, you have to stick to chronological storytelling; people don’t know the future. I’m not one to take that well, by inclination, I often write nonlinear stories, and the human experience it captures is memory. That’s where I think fiction shines, sharing the strength and weaknesses of how we remember events.

I initially wrote the second half of the story non-chronologically as well. It was well received but the interpretations of the story’s ending demonstrated that I’d caused confusion. I decided that we had two important wings of the story. Theodore’s experience in prison is at some point in the future. Elizabeth’s story was of the day that led up to the big mystery event that pushed Theodore down his path, and once we entered fully into Elizabeth’s story, it would be chronological.

For Elizabeth’s story, I realized in the initial writing that the gun was key to setting the chronology. When the story opens, Theodore tries to use the gun. In the section that follows, Theodore has the gun, and it’s a new, dangerous addition to the home. So, when I picked up with what became the main thrust of Elizabeth’s story, I used the gun again to ground us in the chronology. She reports to their therapist that Theodore hasn’t joined them because he’s buying the gun.

Right now, that weapon is the only lynch pin we have on where we are in that part of the story. For Theodore’s section we have the prison outline already, so as his story progresses, we should always know where we are. If the reader remembers that his epiphany came during the twelfth session, that also becomes a counter, as we hit the tenth session and then the eleventh.

The suspense then comes in knowing what happens. It’s the dramatic irony of his week of feeling good about himself, when we know how that’s going to end. The general techniques there are the sense of contrast I learned from McCarthy, and the use of the known as a source of dread, which I learned from Stephen King’s Pet Semetary.

Theodore Beasley bought a gun. No, Elizabeth didn’t want to hold it. No, it wouldn’t solve her inability to sleep at night—nor the lingering certainty that safety was an illusion. Instead, it meant death had a place in their home, in the drawer of Theodore’s nightstand, beside the bed they shared and where she lay awake at night, staring into the ceiling and thinking not of this ceiling which was smooth and still but of her childhood bedroom and the popcorn ceiling that came alive in the interplay of shadows and the lights of cars passing with the hiss of freshly-fallen rain as dragons, knights, and princesses danced across her midnight canvas. Sometimes she was the princess, sometimes the knight, but often the dragon, and she wished she could be the dragon now: fierce, eternal, and unafraid.

I’ve discussed this passage before, in an essay written while the story was still a work-in-progress. The long sentence has a freedom to follow thoughts in unexpected ways, and I love where this took us.

But she did hold the gun. It spoke to her in the sleepless dark, over the whisper of Theodore’s machine as it breathed against his apnea, in and out, like an old man dying of emphysema or an infant struggling to know a second day. She took the holster from the drawer and the gun from the holster and stood by the bed at Theodore’s side, not pointing the gun but feeling its weight and staring at the face hidden beneath straps and hose.

In my first incarnation as a writer, my work was called muscular, while a good friend’s writing was called symphonic. Muscular is good and has its place, but it bothered me that I didn’t know how to move from one to the other. The secret is in sentence length as the long sentence allows you to become the conductor.

Then I offer the sentagraph that turned Theodore into an adulterer, and I did it because I’d piled my insecurities into him, made him incompetent with a gun, and gave him my sleep apnea. All that worked together to create a pathetic character, and the time had come for a splash of contrast. Being an adulterer doesn’t make him less pathetic, but it did adjust how the audience perceived him. We have a bad tendency to group books and generalize their readers. This one is for litbros, and that’s incel literature. I worried about this character being written off as incel literature, and this contrasting fault challenges such an assumption while also confirming Theodore as the villain of the piece.

Once, long ago, dragons distracted from voices raised and doors slammed. Elizabeth had never been a shouter, was afraid to shout, afraid to scream, even when there were reasons to scream, so many reasons held under so much silence. Her whole life was a series of moments, each echoing the last like footsteps down a hall, footsteps in a prison hall, and she from her cell saw neither those to come nor those gone, but only the present prison guard, wearing a different face but the same clothes, the unchanging uniformity of life.

I love the first two sentences and the backstory and psychological present that they suggest. This is where I begin to connect with Elizabeth, and then its connected to the same pattern of thinking we saw with Theodore earlier. Her present emotional moment colors her entire life.

No one could be trusted, and she found herself alone, awake but dreaming of Theodore dead, air sucking through a mask splattered and intermingled with bone and meat, a few teeth dangling at the edges of his jaw.

Later on, I refer to this as the foreshortened timeline of our life that emotion presents, and in the moment, it’s very convincing. I also hint at the idea that Elizabeth is responsible for Theodore’s ruined face, which (along with the metaphor of prison guards on parade) makes for a good bridge into our next section.

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Skinny Mr. Rimsdale, the second-most-frightened man in prison, minced his way into their lives once a week. Theodore Beasley recognized his own kind. Neither man belonged here nor understood this world, but Mr. Rimsdale tried. In his best and most official capacity, he tried, and every session, about halfway through, something somebody said would distract him from his fears, connect him with his own thoughts; and he’d transform before them, the child becoming the man.

Theodore envied him that, and in his tenth group session, he told him so.

I attempt a Cormac McCarthy moment later, but I’m reminded of him here and his classic phrase: the child, the father of the man. What a powerful way to say that who he was as a child informed the man he became. My point is not so erudite, being only that his fear made him childlike but as inspiration took over, the fear melted away, revealing the man.

In the eleventh session, Mr. Rimsdale answered, begging Theodore not to take it wrong, that he would never say this to another living soul in any other situation, but in this case he thought it proper, if Theodore could accept the present his wounded face presented.

“You lived, and the strength it took to overcome, you’ve got no choice but to let the whole world see. The men look at you, and they know. What you’ve been through commands respect.”

Theodore slept on those words for a week, a pillow lighter than air and softer than down. He ate his meals without fear and walked the yard without flinching, such was the culmination of his life’s journey, bringing him to this moment—fierce, immortal, and unafraid.

This is what I meant earlier. If you remember that Theordore’s epiphany ruins everything in his 12th session, you’ll know more than the character. He feels invincible. You know his fragile mortality.

We also keep the ruined face in the forefront of the story. It’s the third time and pretty much guarantees its importance. Plotters don’t understand this aspect of the pantser’s mind. This foreshadowing was in the first draft, and I understood it as foreshadowing. I simply didn’t know what role his ruined face would play. Let me say that again. I didn’t have an ending in mind, but as I wrote about his face, it took the shape of foreshadowing and so gave me hints of what the ending would have to include.

Elizabeth waited. Their therapist waited.

“He said he’d be here,” Elizabeth said. “He said he was buying a gun, but he said he’d be here.”

“Theodore’s buying a gun?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Is this something the two of you discussed?”

“It’s the first I’ve heard him say.”

“So you don’t know why he wants a gun?”

“Well, I don’t know. Last night, he was saying he’d protect me.”

“Do you need protecting?”

“It doesn’t matter. I said that to him. I said, it doesn’t matter.”

“Why doesn’t it matter?”

“Because he’s all talk and always has been. He said he’d be here.”

I’ve written about this section as well, and it’s a simple passage of dialogue that pleases me greatly. As I sat down to it, I sensed the challenge ahead. We really didn’t know Elizabeth yet. Latching onto a few rules for this passage, gave it a form that overcame all those unknowns.

1. Even though there’d been little dialogue in the story thus far, this section would be little else.

2. The therapist would echo dialogue, allowing the focus to be fully on Elizabeth.

3. Elizabeth’s lines would revolve around the word said.

Alone, Elizabeth exited into the waiting room where the damned lingered before the gates of hell. The uniform lifted his eyes. Spurred by an unthinking reflex, Elizabeth looked away.

Should I give away the importance of this paragraph? Yes, I think I should:

It echoes a couple of words from the beginning of the story: damned and uniform. In so doing, it answers that ungrounded question of where the attempted shooting took place.

On the street, Theodore texted his apologies, and a light dusting of pristine snow met with sullied mounds, remnants of the season’s final storm. The sun was shining, and earlier, temperatures had peaked above freezing. Elizabeth considered taking the bus, even though Theodore was on his way. Across the street, spring’s first green trolley jollied along the tracks in no great rush and going nowhere important. She watched it pass, full of nostalgia for a time no one remembered, but the trolley couldn’t take you anywhere useful, only from shopping to shopping, commerce to commerce. The bus could take her home, but she’d had enough of the bus and slipped into the little cafe where she and Theodore always treated themselves and decompressed after a couple’s session, a routine their therapist recommended.

This paragraph introduces the green trolley, the first hint of Elizabeth’s day shopping, which is to me the heart of the piece. This is where we get to know her and witness her growth until she’s able to find her voice and escape a life she never really chose for herself.

Elizabeth chose the cafe because the tables and chairs were delicate and petite, declaring this a space that didn’t make you feel protected but where protection wasn’t necessary. Dangerous men wouldn’t rob a place so girly, the very act being a threat to their manhood and contaminating their gain.

The section will find its flavor in its contrast with Theodore’s story, but I wanted the connection between the two to be clear. She likes this girlie space because it’s a protective barrier against dangerous men, and at this point, we know something about her husband she doesn’t know. We know his will to violence–even if he lacks the talent for it.

She remembered when Theodore seemed little more than a boy—cute, delicate, and untarnished by smut—or so she’d assumed. Maybe she’d been naive. The Washington Post ran that piece about the pervasiveness of perversion. The Internet had claimed the childhood of nearly every adult her age, but she refused to believe it. The fallen always held that the world was in their hole. It wasn’t, or Elizabeth didn’t want it to be. Her cake tasted lonely.

I believe this to be more revealing of Elizabeth than Theodore. She connects his adultery to pornography–the pervasiveness of perversion. I give her an idealism that slouches towards the judgmental, giving her another (former) side of me, and as I’m building these characters, I begin with characters of myself. To become something more, they’ll have to grow their own spines and be their own thing.

End Part 1

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