About

Reading fiction for how it's built.

This is a place for close, unhurried attention to craft — the structural and sentence-level choices that make a piece of fiction work, or fail to.

Most writing advice tells you what to do. Most reviews tell you whether a book succeeded. Neither spends much time on the mechanism in between — the actual decisions, visible in the text, that produce an effect on the reader. That's the gap this blog tries to sit in.

Each essay takes one technique — an unreliable narrator, a paragraph break, a structural promise made in chapter one — and follows it closely enough to say something specific about how it works, using real examples rather than general rules.

New essays roughly monthly. No writing prompts, no publishing-industry news — just the reading.