For almost two years I wrote a weekly "column" (of sorts) about the craft of fiction as part of a writing workshop Facebook group, but I had to stop because of the needs of other work. I thought I should collect those ruminations here on the website.
1. On "Show, Don't Tell" (May 21, 2020)
2. On the "Rules" of POV (May 28, 2020)
3. On Style Guides (June 4, 2020)
4. Writing is Mind Control (June 11, 2020)
5. On Voice (June 18, 2020)
6. On Plot and Character (June 25, 2020)
7. On the Philosophy of Craft (July 2, 2020)
8. On "Having a Hook" (July 9, 2020)
9. On Confusions about Passive Voice (July 16, 2020)
10. On Point of View in Fiction (July 23, 2020)
11. On Writing What You Know (July 30, 2020)
12. On Vision (August 6, 2020)
13. Heeding My Own Advice (August 13, 2020)
14. Why Write in Present Tense? (August 20, 2020)
15. How Show and Tell Intersects with POV (August 27, 2020)
16. On Writing Prompts (September 3, 2020)
17. Writing is the Conscious Use of Language (September 10, 2020)
18. On Proportion (September 17, 2020)
19. On the Oxford Comma (September 24, 2020)
20. On Whether a Story Might Be a Novel (October 1, 2020)
21. On Stealing (October 8, 2020)
22. On Suspense (October 15, 2020)
23. On Being Psychic (October 22, 2020)
24. On Finding the Story (October 29, 2020)
25. On Dialect (November 5, 2020)
26. On Coincidences in Fiction (November 12, 2020)
27. How Characters Make Plot (November 19, 2020)
28. On Writing and Holidays (November 26, 2020)
29. Why Should Anyone Take Writing Advice? (December 3, 2020)
30. On William Faulkner's Nobel Prize Speech (December 10, 2020)
31. On Plato, Aristotle, Character, and Plot (December 17, 2020)
32. On A Visit from Saint Nicholas (December 24, 2020)
33. On the Purpose of Story (December 31, 2020)
34. On Perfective and Imperfective (January 7, 2021)
35. On Habitual Aspect (January 14, 2021)
36. On Grammar Advice (January 21, 2021)
37. On "A Quantitative Philology of Introspection (January 28, 2021)
38. On Construal Level Theory (February 4, 2021)
39. On Reading (February 11, 2021)
40. On Whether Jack and Rose Could Both Have Fit on the Door (February 18, 2021)
41. On Transcribing the Imagination (February 25, 2021)
42. On the Crafting of Flowing Sentences (March 4, 2021)
43. On the Connective Tissue in Narrative (March 11, 2021)
44. On Lie and Lay (March 18, 2021)
45. On Scenes (March 25, 2021)
46. On Telling (April 1, 2021)
47. On Argument and Narrative (April 15, 2021)
48. Grammar and Style and Writing What We Know (April 15, 2021)
49. On Beverly Cleary (April 22, 2021)
50. On Killing Your Darlings (April 29, 2021)
51. On the Beginning of a Story (May 6, 2021)
52. On Italics (May 13, 2021)
53. On "Show, Don't Tell" Again (May 20, 2021)
54. On What Makes a Story Complete (May 27, 2021)
55. On Writing What You Know (June 10, 2021)
56. On Drama (June 17, 2021)
57. On "Method" Writing (June 24, 2021)
58. On the Deus Ex Machina (July 1, 2021)
59. On the Suspension of Disbelief (July 8, 2021)
60. On the Process of Writing (July 15, 2021)
61. On Show and Tell Yet Again (July 22, 2021)
62. How Writing Prompts Teach Writing (July 29, 2021)
63. On an Underlying Philosophy of Fiction (August 5, 2021)
64. On POV in The Three Little Pigs (August 12, 2021)
65. On Freedom of the Will and Fiction (August 19, 2021)
66. On Doing More Than One Thing at a Time (August 26, 2021)
67. On Ascending the Heights (September 2, 2021)
68. On Ursula K. Le Guin's Distinctions of Style (September 9, 2021)
69. On Curtis Sittenfeld's Criteria (September 16, 2021)
70. On Reading Every Word (September 23, 2021)
71. What is a Story? (September 30, 2021)
72. On the Fictive Mode (October 7, 2021)
73. On the Meaning of a Story (October 14, 2021)
74. The Industry of Fiction-Writing is a Scam (October 21, 2021)
75. Fiction as Philosophical Method (October 28, 2021)
76. An Aesthetic Framework (November 4, 2021)
77. On Profluence (November 11, 2021)
78. On Idiosyncrasies in Word Usage (November 18, 2021)
79. On Letting Characters Change the Story (December 2, 2021)
80. On a Critique of Poe's "Single Effect in the Prose Tale" (December 9, 2021)
81. On the Essence of Fiction (December 16, 2021)
82. A Guiding Definition of Story (January 13, 2022)
83. The Original Source of Writing Advice (January 20, 2022)
84. On What You're Trying to Say With a Story (January 27, 2022)
85. On Participial Adjuncts (February 3, 2022)
86. Defining Flash Fiction (February 17, 2022)
87. On the Aesthetics of Prose Flow (March 3, 2022)