Subscribe now

Building Meaning: Part Three

Authors: Stop Talking to Yourself

The 6 R’s of Building Meaning in Stories.

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

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

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

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

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

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

Later in the very brief chapter, he writes:

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

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

And then the chapter ends with this:

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

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

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

In chapter 2, Hemingway writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he packs his bags to go home.

— Thaddeus Thomas

The Roles of the Six R’s of Meaning

Establishing patterns that confirm the presence of meaning:

Repetition and Reflection.

A story’s language of meaning:

Relex.

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

Reference, Recontextualization, and Resolution.

Building Meaning

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

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

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

Subscribe now

In a Parallel Universe, Dickens Lays Down the Beat

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

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

The Book of the New Sun — Gene Wolfe

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

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

Find a Victim — Ross MacDonald

Parallelism in Dickens

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

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

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

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

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

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

The passage has a number of parallel constructions.

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

It was appointed… It was appointed….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reality Check

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

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

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

Forms of Parallelism

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

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

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

Other Forms of Repetition

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

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

The Sound and The Fury — William Faulkner

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

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

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

Mrs. Dalloway — Virginia Woolf

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

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

Twilight by Stephanie Meyer

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

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

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

— Thaddeus Thomas

How a Writer Conducts the Reader like a Symphony Orchestra

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

Cadence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

Phonemes

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

That /f/ sound is known as a fricative.

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

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

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

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

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

Stressed Syllables

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

Whatever wonders befall man tonight…

Which one breaks men tonight…

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

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

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

Examples

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

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce

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

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

Mrs. Dalloway — Virginia Woolf

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

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

Flow Between Words and Phrases

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Polished and muscular and torsional.

The pattern creates tension which is resolved through the change.

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

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

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

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

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

— Thaddeus Thomas

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

In the performance, we write.

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.

Subscribe now

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…

Read more

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

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

Meaning has Six Rs

Here are the first four:

• Repetition

• Reflection

• Recontextualization

• Resolution

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

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

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

As Good As It Gets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Does the story mean anything in its present state?

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

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

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

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

One Star Review

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

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

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

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

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

The Story’s Current Meaning

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

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

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

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

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

The Current Resolution

It was glorious chaos. I took a photo.

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

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

I had another idea.

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

A week? These people are saints.

Building Meaning

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

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

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

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

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

Rewriting Earlier Material

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

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

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

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

For that, I’m looking to this passage:

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

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

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

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

In his mind, anyway.

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

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

A Note on Recontextualization

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

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

This Essay’s Resolution

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

— Thaddeus Thomas

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

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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

Subscribe now

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?

Subscribe now

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

Subscribe now

The Republic of Letters

How Metamodernism Can Save Us All

Dear Republic…

Read more

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

The Republic of Letters

Meta-Modernism In Action

Dear Republic…

Read more

9 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…

Read more

10 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…

Read more

10 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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

— Thaddeus Thomas

• Focus on character over plot.

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

• Stop over-explaining.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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

Subscribe now

— Thaddeus Thomas

Subscribe now

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

Subscribe now

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

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

This time, I attempt to write:

The Truest Essay I Know

This article is part of Literary Salon issue #4.

Now is the perfect time to commit to a new relationship with the Literary Salon.

• Not a subscriber? Subscribe at no cost.

• Already a subscriber? Become a paid subscriber at a huge savings.

• Already a paid subscriber? Become a True Fan and help me keep those discounts going for writers and readers on a tight literary budget.

Subscribe now

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.