Category Archives: Writing tips

What a Twist Actually Is A good plot twist is not a fact. It’s an argument with the reader’s memory. The industry loves to describe twists as surprises, but that word is too small for what is actually happening. Surprise is merely the sensation at the surface. Underneath, the story has been training the audience […]

Sitting before a manuscript that just won’t yield, a seasoned writer can feel a block as formidable as any blank-page drought. The frustration here is specific: you have words on the page but they resist improvement. What’s needed is not generation of new content, but transformation of the old. Joan Didion, for one, treats this […]

A writer stares at a page of crisp type and feels nothing. The characters traipse from one obvious beat to the next, each scene predictably handing off to the one after it, like well-rehearsed background dancers. There’s no sharp turn or jolt, no moment that makes the reader gasp or drop their coffee cup, and […]

In quiet study corners and makeshift home offices around the world, a new kind of reader has begun to stir. This reader isn’t human at all, but an artificial intelligence. Armed with advanced language models like OpenAI’s GPT-5.1, Google’s Gemini, and Elon Musk’s Grok, it can ingest whole manuscripts in the blink of an eye […]

When T.S. Eliot finished The Waste Land in 1922, he famously credited Ezra Pound as “il miglior fabbro” (the better craftsman) for whipping his unwieldy draft into shape.1 Great writing has always depended on great rewriting. In fact, Eliot’s first draft of that landmark poem was far messier than the masterpiece we know, until severe […]

Even when the eyes are too heavy to parse the page, a quiet revolution in editing is possible: turn the text into sound. Novelists and essayists know that pushing through fatigue or distraction by rereading can feel like torture. Author Suzy Vadori calls the “listening pass” — using Siri or any text-to-speech reader — her […]

In early 2023 Rochester salesman Brett Schickler watched in amazement as ChatGPT (OpenAI’s text-generating chatbot) spun out a fully‑illustrated 30‑page children’s book in a few hours[1]. Schickler, a novice writer, credited simple prompts (“write a story about a dad teaching his son financial literacy”) for the output. His experience was far from unique: a Reuters […]

In the alchemy of storytelling, the outline or treatment often functions as the writer’s secret safety net. It may sound paradoxical to talk about formulas when discussing flights of fancy, but even the wildest tales typically have an unseen scaffold. Veteran writer M.D. Presley wryly notes that a screenplay’s treatment “acts like the general outline […]