Like a lot of writers and other artists, I deal with imposter syndrome, and not the kind where I toss little colorful astronauts out of airlocks. I have this spark of hope that maybe, actually, I’m not bad at creating stuff, but I also have a black hole of dread and shame and fear of rejection that swallows the spark faster than a puppy snarfing up food dropped on the floor. Every success is a fluke, every compliment is a lie, and anyone who is fooled into thinking anything positive about me or my work will soon realize they’ve been duped*.

One of the techniques used in The Artist’s Way to help people deal with these, to use an extremely scientific term, “badfeels,” is creative affirmations. The actual list in the book is strongly spiritual—”I am a channel for God’s creativity,” “My dreams come from God,” and so on—but more generally the text explores the idea of replacing negative beliefs and self-talk with positive statements. These can be things like “I deserve love” or “I deserve fair pay” or “I deserve a rewarding creative life,” but they can also be compliments like “I am a brilliant and successful artist” or “I have rich creative talents.”

When our brains object to these statements, we’re supposed to write down those objections and try to figure out where they came from. Who hurt us? Who made us doubt ourselves? Who told us the mean things that we’re now repeating back to ourselves? That exploration is meant to be cleansing, an emotional enema that will then allow us to believe in the affirmations instead of rejecting them.

For some people, this absolutely works. I wish I was one of them.

For me, affirmations are lies I’m trying to tell myself. No amount of external assurance or internal arguing will get rid of this conviction. If you tied me to a chair and clamped my eyelids open and forced me to watch video after video brainwashing me into believing “I have rich creative talents,” I can assure you, my droogs, I would go full Clockwork Orange on myself within days.

It comes back to trust. I already struggle to trust myself, so telling me I have to convince myself of things I believe to be untrue simply reinforces that I am not to be trusted. It’s the emotional equivalent of pulling myself up by my bootstraps; it can’t be done, and it ends in frustration and pain.

It also becomes a vicious cycle. I try to tell myself a positive thing; I reject it as a lie that I’m just telling myself so I’ll feel better; I lose trust in myself because I know I’m lying to myself, making me a lying liar who lies; future attempts to tell myself positive things are rejected even harder. All I’m doing is eroding any trust in myself, and that erosion spreads from my creative endeavors to all aspects of my life and thoughts and feelings. If I’ll lie to myself about this, what else?

I don’t spend all my time wallowing in a pit of despair—not about this, anyway—so clearly I have developed coping strategies that allow me to get my work done. Maybe they’ll work for you, too.

The thing I do most frequently evolved from a technique I learned from a meditation app: noting. It goes like this: I have dark thoughts about myself, my writing, my career, whatever. I have to get stuff done in spite of the thoughts. I note that I’m having those thoughts, the same way I’d note the weather outside my house. “Look, it’s raining.” “Look, there are those ‘my writing sucks and I’ll never amount to anything’ thoughts again.”

I don’t force myself to ignore the thoughts, because that actually ends up paradoxically putting more focus on them and thus they stick around longer—it’s like yelling “I’m not looking at you!” at the rain, which, to do that, you’re kind of definitely looking at it, aren’t you? Or at least covering your eyes and thinking about how you’re not looking at it, no sir. And arguing with them? Same deal: then I’m having unpleasant conversations with the voices in my head, and I really would rather be writing, or cleaning my bathroom, or doing almost anything else that is either more productive or relaxing.

Instead, I try to shift my attention to the thing I’m supposed to be doing, even though those thoughts are still there, the same way I’d look away from the window as it’s raining outside. The rain hasn’t stopped, I’m not ignoring it per se, it’s just there but I’m not staring at it. I’m starting a sprint timer, possibly in a Discord with other people or while watching a Twitch stream, and I’m getting back to work.

You may have seen a comic at some point, of someone yelling “I don’t like thing” and then the clouds part and an angel descends from heaven and hands them a piece of paper, upon which is written, simply, “ok” in block print. Noting is basically me, the angel, handing my moody brain that piece of paper and then returning to heaven to get back to my angel duties. The yelling person isn’t gone, but I’m not standing there letting them continue to yell at me. I acknowledge them, and I move on.

It took a lot of practice to get this technique to work consistently, but it’s been way more successful for me than affirmations because I’m not actually telling myself anything. I’m not trying to force my thoughts to be positive, or convince myself that my badfeels are wrong. All I’m doing is… working anyway.

Is it spite? I don’t feel spiteful, but maybe it’s a little bit that. I think, weirdly, it’s more similar to defeatism, or perhaps acceptance. Maybe I can’t stop that mean little voice, but I can put my headphones on, crank up the lo-fi beats, and let it fade to background noise.

Sometimes, going back to The Artist’s Way methods, sharing the badfeels with friends can also help me move past them. I can say, “I’m feeling like crap today in this specific way, I know it will pass, but I had to get it out.” And they’ll remind me that, yes, it will pass, just like the weather does, eventually. And even if it doesn’t, I can grab an umbrella or a raincoat and go get the groceries anyway.

Okay, this analogy is getting away from me, but you see what I mean.

Can “writer lies” ever work? For some people, absolutely. And some ways of constructing them may succeed better than others.

A friend of mine (AJ Hackwith) coined that term, specifically, for the “lies” we tell ourselves to be able to get our writing done. They can be things like, “I’m going to pretend I’m writing a fanfic of my own story,” or “I’m only going to write two sentences and then stop.” These may not even be lies, technically speaking; maybe you ARE going to treat your story like it’s a fanfic, or you’ll stop after two sentences instead of getting hyped enough to continue. Part of what makes the assertions work is that seed of truth or possibility.

Which leads to the next note, which I got from someone (Susan Alia) on Bluesky: sometimes an affirmation can work if it’s built on something you know to be true. One example that I’ve deployed, to mixed success—because, again, affirmations are not For Me as a rule—is, “You’ve done this before and you can do it again.” I tend to use it when I’m having, perhaps not writer’s block exactly, but writer’s inertia, where I can’t make myself start working out of fear that the writing will be bad.

The first half of that affirmation is demonstrably true; I have written many things! There’s a whole page on my website dedicated to the ones that have been published. It then stands to reason, even if it’s not certain, that the second half of the affirmation COULD be true, that the odds of it being true are good enough that if I get back to work, maybe I can MAKE it be true.

Ultimately, that’s what this all comes down to: building our truths, and weathering our storms. You may not be able to shut down intrusive thoughts, but you also don’t have to stop what you’re doing and give them your attention. You may not be able to chant the rain away, but you can close the curtains, make some tea, take your meds, and let the clouds do their thing while you do yours**.

*As a side note, a thing one of my therapists mentioned regarding compliments: if I reject a compliment that someone gives me, I am effectively calling that person a liar. Am I actually going to sit here and consider all my friends and all the fans of my work to be liars? Or fools that I’ve somehow tricked into liking me or my art? Of course not! That’s really messed up! Thinking about my imposter syndrome this way helps me get past it when it flares up, because I am highly susceptible to guilt even if logic doesn’t always work.

**People who are in a crisis situation should not be reading this and going, “But I am stuck outside in the rain and I have no way to get dry, so this makes no sense!” Or rather, yes, that’s the natural response, because if you’re in a crisis situation then the first thing you need to worry about is finding a way to get out of the crisis. This is not an essay for people who need solutions to extremely serious life problems; this is not a “this, too, shall pass” or “just keep swimming” or “stay positive” kind of reply to hardship. You can’t bootstrap your way out of poverty or war or political turmoil or illness. Anyone who pretends there are easy solutions to complex problems is probably trying to sell you something.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, The Artist’s Way is a book by Julia Cameron that has been around for decades, and that a lot of folks have used successfully to get themselves unstuck when their creativity has been blocked somehow. It’s a 12-week program, with each week focusing on “recovering” a different element of creativity, and a few specific techniques maintained throughout.

I’m not writing this to criticize the book or warn anyone away from it; it’s a tool that has worked for a lot of people, and I’m all for trying tools to see whether they work for you*. But I am one of the people for whom this tool did not work, and I know others who had similar experiences, so I’ve been pondering the whys and wherefores of it for a while. I thought it might help to write them out, not just for my own personal understanding, but in case it’s useful to others who also struggled.

For a start, the spiritual/religious aspects of the book can be off-putting to some. Despite attempts to spin this as optional, discussions of God and the divine nature of the creative impulse are pervasive, arguably central to the core tenets of the process. The subtitle of the book is “A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity”; says it right there on the tin, so to speak. You can do some work to ignore this or scoot around it, but it is work to a certain extent. If this doesn’t bother you, it’s not a problem; if it does, you may bounce off this entirely from the beginning.

The second speed bump is one of the core techniques of The Artist’s Way: the daily pages. Every morning, you’re supposed to take a half hour to write, by hand in a notebook, three pages of something, anything, whatever you want. They don’t have to be good or make sense; they’re supposed to drain your brain of all the gunk that’s clogging your pipes, so to speak, so the creative waters can flow freely.

Unfortunately, for me, the pages drained… everything. By the time I’d finished them every day—it absolutely took me longer than a half hour to do—I was exhausted and I struggled to get my energy back. A process that was supposed to clear the old lotion from the bottle’s pump instead emptied the bottle completely.

For someone with limited time and emotional resources, being told to do a thing like this every single day? It’s incredibly demoralizing and a recipe for failure, guilt and shame. I persisted, hoping it would get easier, faster, that all my effort would be rewarded if I didn’t give up. Instead, it got worse. By the time I stopped, the only thing I was writing was the daily pages, which were mostly diaries of my own feelings of incompetence.

The first week’s goal is to recover one’s sense of safety**. The idea behind this is to find out what or who has stifled your creativity, to dig into your past and unearth the moments when you were put down or made to feel worthless, talentless, frivolous, and in doing so to free yourself from those burdens so you can feel safe to create again. Unfortunately, for me, the daily pages ended up being a big part of what was contributing to those negative emotions on an ongoing basis. They made me feel deeply insecure when they were supposed to do the opposite.

It took me weeks to quit and move on. One of the hardest things about any creative program or process is figuring out whether it’s genuinely not working for you, or whether you need to give it more time and effort. Habits can be onerous to implement. Practice makes progress, but benefits can be incremental or hard to perceive. The right way may not be the easy way, and we want easy. Why wouldn’t we? Who wants anything to be difficult?

There’s a boundary, though, where difficult becomes harmful. Instead of committing to a challenge that you’ll ultimately derive tangible benefits from, you’re hurting yourself and making things worse. To use an exercise comparison, you’re not strengthening your muscles, you’re damaging them, straining them. Recovering from that can not only put you right back where you started, it may also leave you worse off, in need of additional time and emotional energy to heal.

Again, this is not me criticizing the book so much as thinking about why it didn’t work for me. In doing so, I’m also considering alternate approaches that might be better for someone like me, and maybe someone like you, especially in these extremely trying times. I already have a few ideas! I’ll let you know what I come up with.

*Within reason. Sometimes we waste a lot of time searching for the One Tool that will solve all our problems, instead of using the tools we already have as best we can. This kind of Holy Grail quest can be self-defeating, hamster wheel spinning, yak shaving, cat waxing… whatever you want to call it.

**I’m confining myself to the notion of safety the book is addressing. I could write a whole separate essay on the many ways in which safety is an impossible goal for some people depending on a host of factors, and how artists often make art despite their circumstances, and how it frankly sucks and we shouldn’t glorify art created from pain, suffering and deprivation.

As I make my way through Mage You Look while also pondering side and future projects, and chat with all kinds of writers in various places about our respective processes, a thing I think about is seeing how people approach… I’ll call it rigidity vs. malleability.

For some writers, specific characters or world elements or plot points are fixed, immutable, and everything else must be built up around those things. They’re the foundations of the story house; they’re the seeds that grow into the story tree, or bush, or flower. Even if the furniture in the house moves around, or the bush gets trimmed into a topiary, those essential starter components don’t change, no matter how big or small they are.

For me, most things are negotiable. When I’m planning, I brainstorm and feel my way around, looking for shiny stuff like a corvid. And that stuff can be surprisingly vague: traits or themes rather than specific details. Archetypes or aesthetics. Vague plot shapes. I research and iterate. I fiddle and test. I make notes. I accrete. I roll around a katamari and see what sticks to it.

There comes a point for me where things do solidify, like I’ve finished my clay sculpture and I’ve fired it and now its form is set. Eventually the katamari is large enough to get yeeted into space and become a star. Except even then I may still make fundamental changes, beyond playing with the colors or extra decorations or whatever. There’s always room for that: the play, the tweaking and revision.

I think sometimes writers forget we control all the variables in a story. If something doesn’t make sense, we can rework it until it does. A character who wouldn’t make a choice in one scenario may do so if the conditions change, or if something in their back story shifts. A setting detail that doesn’t fit can be taken out or made to make sense. One plot point can be substituted for another.

Character, setting, plot, theme… they’re all up to the writer. They’re all the result of a series of choices. How you make those choices is up to you! But you have the power to control them, to set the parameters. And that power can be exercised at any time in the process.

Even after a thing is published and set in stone, there is still room to play. Things have to be internally consistent, logical, believable within the confines of what’s established. But within that framework, there are often ways to retcon, to reveal new layers that recontextualize the existing ones, to create ambiguity and uncertainty, add unreliable narration… There are many available tools to reshape or repaint or refine.

So I guess my bottom line is: embrace your process, but also internalize that you control your story. You can always add a room onto your house regardless of its foundation, or plant a vine to wrap around your tree. Take the reins! Embrace your agency! Revel in the act of creation! You’re the deity in this universe you’re crafting, and you can do anything you want with it.

Where Peace Is Lost comes out tomorrow! As with most books, this one has had a long and winding journey to publication. I wanted to talk a bit about one of the things that led me to write this particular book, out of all the other possible ideas racketing around in my head. Here we go.

---

People with ADHD often have an overdeveloped sense of fairness, of right and wrong. It’s called justice sensitivity, and it makes us more likely to have strong reactions to little things like people leaving garbage on a picnic table, or big things like racism and social inequity. We get angry when people are victimized; we worry about wronging someone, and feel intense shame and guilt when we think we’ve done so; we retreat into hopelessness when huge problems seem unsolvable, like trying to climb a mountain wearing lead boots. We obsess. We doomscroll. We overthink.

Where Peace Is Lost tells the story of Kel, a former knight whose order was disbanded, as a condition of the treaty that ended the war they lost. To protect her people and preserve the integrity of that treaty, she’s gone into hiding on a planet far from the galaxy’s population centers. If she were a Dungeons & Dragons character, she would be a lawful good paladin, and she’s a product of my justice sensitivity.

I love paladins! My power fantasy is helping people, and paladins are magically empowered to do this–in role-playing games, anyway. But I didn’t want to rely on the rulings of coastal mages to construct my hero and the order she represented, so I looked at different historical and fictional examples of knights. Unfortunately, a lot of them are, to use the vernacular, heckin gross.

The term “paladin” comes from the legendary knights who served Charlemagne, who himself is one of the Nine Worthies we should all aspire to emulate… except he was pretty much constantly at war, and let’s just say my dude, ahem, made a lot of babies with a lot of ladies, including his underage second wife. The Matter of France positions the paladins as brave Christian defenders against Saracen invaders, so hey, religiously-motivated violence. Awesome! (Author’s note: it was not awesome.)

Arthuriana is all about powerful people helping the less fortunate, though, right? Well, mostly, but it depends on what you mean by “helping” and which sources you’re reading. Arthur conquered most of northern Europe, skipped off to Gaul to declare himself emperor, then got backstabbed by his wife and… Mordred? Lancelot? You decide! Either way, if this were an Am I the Asshole post, everyone sucks here. Kay is a stubborn hothead. Galahad is a judgmental jerk. Even my beloved himbo Gawain needs to get better at puns, reading the fine print, and managing his polycule. Bedivere is… you know, he made that wooden rabbit, we’ll let him slide.

Knights Templar? Holy corporate malfeasance, Batman! Teutonic Knights? Kept trying to conquer Prussia. Order of the Garter? I mean, you don’t want your armor falling off mid-battle, I guess. The Jedi? A monastic mishmash that stole kids from their moms. Pobody’s nerfect!

My justice sensitivity is snarling at this point. I grew up reading books and watching movies about these honorable, chivalrous characters who protected the weak and defended the defenseless. But revisiting the depths beneath the surface of these paragons of virtue was disheartening, to say the least. And what did it say about me that I kept fixating on people who solved problems with violence? There had to be a better way.

I didn’t have an Anakin Skywalker moment where I dramatically declared that paladins were evil and started on my path to the dark side. Instead, I decided to engage in a little might makes right using the power of my pen, which as we all know is mightier than the sword.

I sifted through my research for something to build on and settled on the Knights Hospitaller. Their order started, as the name implies, with a hospital. They provided medical care and lodging for the unwashed barbarians–I mean, the pilgrims visiting Jerusalem, and eventually expanded to include military protection for those travellers. (And briefly, weirdly, the Italian air force after World War II, sort of.) That origin in healing rather than harming appealed to me immensely, and I built on that foundation for Kel’s order, focusing on principles of medical care, teaching, mutual aid and protection.

For the character of Kel as a specific member of this order, I wanted someone strong, loyal, brave, and honorable in ways that would be tested by allies and taken advantage of by unscrupulous enemies. But justice sensitivity is a double-edged sword, so I leaned into her feelings of hopelessness about her situation. At the start of the book, Kel has intentionally withdrawn from society, living alone in a swamp and rarely engaging with her neighbors. She tells herself it’s necessary, to keep her enemies from finding her and using her as an excuse to shut down the sole remaining charitable arm of her order–or worse, to reignite war. She’s not wrong, but it’s not her whole truth; her former life of service was shattered by injustice, and she never recovered. She wallows in shame and guilt, subconsciously choosing to protect her wounded heart by avoiding exposure to circumstances that could remind her of her inability to defeat a massive, powerful empire.

If you’re really dedicated to justice, though–if you’re going to live that proverbial paladin life, better than the ugly mess scattered across the historical and fictional record–then hiding isn’t going to work. Avoiding exposure to injustice doesn’t make it disappear, it simply removes it from your field of vision. Kel learns this the hard way, and has to decide what she’s going to do when she can no longer look away.

Justice sensitivity can make us feel hopeless, helpless, powerless–but it can also galvanize us to make things right. Instead of hiding, we can show up. Instead of giving in, we can push back. Instead of surrendering, we can fight for justice. Empathy can weigh us down like lead boots as we climb those endless cliffs of inequity, but it can also give us wings to fly beyond them, all the way up to the stars.

I read an article a while back aimed primarily at fantasy writers starting to learn the craft, about how magic must have a price OR ELSE! With “or else” basically meaning “your story sucks and you have made bad choices,” I guess.

Almost every time I read an article like this, the examples of “prices” are things like “magic drains your life force” or “it makes you lose your mind” or “it requires blood sacrifice” and I find it interesting that this is where notions of “price” tend to go. I think “price” is typically used to mean downside or drawback, which are certainly definitions of the word. While penalties or negative consequences are kinds of prices, they’re not the only kinds.

They’re not even strictly necessary! I’ve chatted with people from cultures that see magic in everyday life, and they almost uniformly found the concept of magical price jarring, as it’s described above. Magic just is! You do an egg cleanse ritual, and it gets rid of negative energy. Boom. Done. Why would it have a downside? What penalty? Did you try to curse someone? Is a ghost angry at you? Let me get you a prayer candle…

Price can be a good source of drama and angst. It can be one of the story’s conflict engines. I think, though, the way I keep seeing it discussed, price primarily functions as a limitation, a reason why magic isn’t the solution to all of life’s problems and may in fact cause its own. Price is typically an attempt to control magic use in stories so there’s no deus ex machina running rampant all over the place like a kaiju, breaking the suspension bridge of disbelief and stomping plot holes in the roads and otherwise destroying internal consistency.

But you can establish limitations that don’t default to some grim or grisly sacrifice, or enormous risk to those involved and possibly innocent bystanders. The “rules” for magic in a given fictional world can be rigid or flexible, clearly explicated or deliberately obfuscated, and you can still keep readers from asking the dreaded question: why didn’t they just…?

One alternate way to think of price is cost. Literally. Sometimes the price of magic is straight up money or access to materials. You can’t do magic if you can’t get the components. Simple comparison: plenty of people live in food deserts. Why can’t magic’s price be, “Oh no, the bodega downstairs is out of snake blood, and I can’t pay $10 for their dried frog skin anyway, guess this spell isn’t happening until my next paycheck or my cousin can drive me to Aldi”? Not a downside, but certainly a limitation.

Depending on the nature of magic in your story, you could also explore the ways in which people with limited money or access have to deal with substitutions as a matter of course. Maybe freshly harvested licorice root is ideal for a spell, but store-bought will work–with less potent results. Maybe a high-quality emerald will hold an enchantment best, but a cheaper peridot will get the job done–with occasional glitches. Maybe someone attempts a swap of thyme with something else in the mint family for a potion, hoping it’s close enough–and the effects are wildly different.

What if the expense of magic is similar to taking out a college loan, with equivalent social pressures? Maybe a debt collector isn’t going to literally eat your soul like a conjured demon might, but it’s close enough. (Or maybe there’s a cool soul-eating debt collector story waiting to be written…) If you think about it, magic loans might incentivize risky behavior if difficult-to-harvest reagents are more expensive. And imagine the secondary market for that stuff, like the used textbook market but backwards? “If I can get a claw scraping off that sleeping dragon, that takes care of two months of payments!”

There are, of course, many other ways to build limits into your magic systems. But don’t feel like you need to engage in literary contortion in an attempt to comply with a rule that isn’t actually set in stone. Ultimately, you should go with what works best for your story’s world and characters and plot and theme. Be thoughtful, be intentional, and keep a bottle of peroxide on hand if you do end up engaging in blood sacrifices. Don’t want to end up with stains on your good ritual robes.

I think a lot about antagonists.

Depending on the protagonist’s goals, it can be difficult to find believable or relatable reasons why someone would be working against them, without resorting to mustache-twirling levels of villainy. It’s also true that not every story needs an explicit antagonist, but it’s often helpful to create a character or two or ten who represent the antagonistic forces in a story.

And so, in the interests of making writing easier and making antagonists better, I offer some thoughts on possible avenues of interrogation that might lead to useful options.

• Who would be harmed by the protagonist’s success and how?
• Who would be helped by the protagonist’s failure and how?
• Whose enemy would be helped by the protagonist’s success?
• Whose ally would be helped by the protagonist’s failure?
• Who would benefit from the protagonist failing in a specific way?
• How would failing in a specific way prevent a larger potential harm caused by the protagonist’s success, or by a different form of failure?
• Who would believe the protagonist’s failure would serve the greater good, or be the lesser of two evils?
• Who would believe the protagonist’s immediate failure would be beneficial in the long run, even if it caused a short-term harm?
• Who would believe failure is in the protagonist’s best interests?
• Who has a compelling reason to defeat the protagonist at any cost?
• Who has the same underlying motivation as the protagonist and how are their goals mutually exclusive?
• Who might be opposing the protagonist based on incomplete information or outright lies?

All of these questions can work in reverse if you have a better idea of who your villain is and need to hone your protagonist instead. You can also expand them to cover potential allies and enemies more broadly, and to build factions as well as individuals. And, as with any list like this, feel free to only ponder the ones that help you, and ignore the rest!

Are there any variations on these kinds of questions that you use to figure out who your story’s antagonists are?

Blades in the Dark is a really cool tabletop RPG with a mechanic I love: progress clocks. I’ve been thinking for a while about how something like this can be used to outline a novel, and so I present to you: the Clock Outline.

Think of your novel as a series of clocks with different numbers of segments: four, six, twelve, you decide. Big clocks, little clocks. Fast and slow clocks. Obvious and secret clocks. Literal countdowns and figurative ones.

Actions your characters take either succeed, or succeed but cause some extra undesirable consequence to happen, or fail and cause harm and new problems (that may create a new clock). Each success or failure will cause a clock segment to be filled in on one or more of the clocks, and the hand of that clock will move closer to midnight.

You have one big clock for each large chunk of plot in the whole book, between 2 and 5 clocks, about 6-12 segments each. These could correspond with acts or sections. You also have many smaller clocks, 4-6 segments each. These could correspond with scenes or chapters, though some clocks will resolve across multiple chapters.

Every clock has a specific label delineating what will happen when it’s completely filled, for example: The Doomsday Weapon Will Be Complete, or Character A Falls In Love With Character B, or Character C Is Murdered. Clocks can involve external or internal consequences, main plots or subplots or side quests, individuals or factions, even character relationships over the course of the story.

Based on what will happen when each clock is filled, consider what kinds of actions might cause this outcome to become more likely. Also consider the ramifications of filling each individual clock segment.

Plotting then becomes a series of questions:

• What is the situation/setup/problem?
• What will your characters do?
• How do antagonistic forces react?
• What happens as a result?
• Which/how many clock segments are filled by this?

You don’t have to decide everything in advance; this method also works if you’re improvising! Create the clocks as you go based on how your story progresses. Fill them in when it feels right. Use them to track rather than plan.

You can physically draw clocks on a paper or whiteboard or similar to track this, and note what happens to fill each clock segment. Big clocks at the top, smaller clocks underneath, or work horizontally if your brain likes it better.

If drawing clocks is too visual, you could think of it as nested lists, or even lay the “clocks” out in spreadsheet columns, or treat it like filling out a planner—year, month, week and day segments breaking down the bigger and smaller plot points.

For those who like to think in tentpoles, these clocks can basically serve as countdowns to when those tentpoles happen. They’re a series of actions, choices, scenes and sequences, that lead inexorably to the next tentpole.

Caveat: as with all writing stuff, this method may not work for you, or for your current project, and that’s okay! Everyone is different and has different needs and preferences. Also: adapt it however you see fit! Use it for some parts and not others, make your own clocks, etc.

To learn more about Blades in the Dark and get your own copy of the rules, visit https://bladesinthedark.com.

And if you want to watch or listen to me and the rest of the Strange Friends crew play Blades in the Dark, head over to speculatesf.com.

If this looks familiar, it’s because I’m continuing to pull useful artifacts from certain deteriorating social media sites to preserve them in my own internet museum. Hope this one helps!

---

I often write the pitch or blurb for my novels before anything else. I may scribble some notes here and there, spitball a few ideas, but that pitch helps me crystallize essential stuff that I can then expand into a synopsis, then an outline. It’s not quite the Snowflake Method, but it’s close.

So after writing so many pitches, I thought: how do I write them? What stuff do I include? How much coffee do I drink first and what does chartreuse smell like once the caffeine hits?

1. Magic.
2. Magic.
3. Magic.

But seriously, here’s what I do; maybe it will help you.

To write a pitch, I need three things. Three P’s, in fact. And sometimes an O. Hah, Threepio. Anyway. The three P’s: Protagonist(s), Place, Problem. Who is the main character? Where does the story take place? And what problem are they facing?

For the protagonist, I try to focus on what’s most relevant to the story. Whatever the reader needs to know for problem to make sense, to matter, and to suggest why THIS person is the one doing the stuff and why they’re worth following around.

For the place, I want to show how the world of the story is different from ours. Again, ideally I focus on things that are relevant to the character and problem. Think of every “in a world” setup you’ve heard in a movie trailer, and how it establishes the status quo.

For the problem, I try to tie it into character. Here is the thing that has gone wrong and needs fixing, the secret that forces the character to make a choice, the event or situation that sets them on the path to Hijinks. I establish the win condition and price of failure, aka the stakes.

What about the O in Threepio? That’s for Opposition. If you’ve got it, you can include something about people or forces trying to prevent your character from solving the problem. Sometimes (often) the opposition includes the character themself, getting in their own way.

Every story is different, so stuff won’t always fit neatly into the three P’s I’ve outlined. But it’s somewhere to start, and it can help focus you whether you’re planning a book or you’ve already written it and are trying to distill its essence for querying purposes. Good luck!