Twin Flames

Spicy Romantasy with a Tarot Twist

Category: Creative Seasons

  • How does tarot (really) work?

    How does tarot (really) work?

    Last week, we climbed the Tree of Life, viewing the same situation—Thursday night book club—from different vantage points. The Tree of Life is a precise arrangement of archetypes, and our ascent was a psychic one, not literal travel.

    Today, I want to explore how archetypes are more than mental constructs. They can affect the physical world, and learning how is a powerful tool in our practical magic bag.

    Let’s start with a strange little book by Jung’s colleague, Marie-Louise von Franz, called On Divination and Synchronicity.

    Von Franz writes:

    “The relationships and the facts of the [I Ching] could be compared with the network of an electric circuit, which penetrates all things. It has the possibility of being lit up but it does not light up unless the person who puts a question has established contact with a definite question. One should therefore not throw an I Ching without first asking, ‘What question do I really have in mind? What do I really want to ask?’ By that one makes contact with one’s unconscious, and asks it to suggest the [solution to] the question.” (p. 58-59)

    This mirrors my stance on the tarot: by posing a question before drawing a card, you “light up” the relevant answers in the energetic field that connects your individual psyche, the collective unconscious, and the cards.

    Last week, when we used the Tree of Life to reinterpret book club, we were doing something similar. We posed the scenario as a “question” and watched different sephiroth light up. Netzach illuminated raw emotion at the scene level, Tiphareth illuminated larger patterns at the level of character arc, and Binah illuminated archetypal themes.

    Back to von Franz:

    “I want to now introduce a new idea, which Jung has not used…the idea or the concept of a field to explore what Jung calls the collective unconscious, a field in which the archetype would be the single activated point. [Theoretical physicist, John Archibald] Wheeler, for instance, defines matter as an electro-dynamic field in which the particles are the excited points. Now I propose…that the collective unconscious is a field of psychic energy, the excited points of which are archetypes.” (p. 61)

    This is fascinating. Here, archetypes are described as excited points of energy in a field—in this case, the field of the collective unconscious—just as matter is described as excited points in an electrodynamic field.

    But what if those fields were actually the same?

    This is what Jung’s theory of synchronicity claims.

    Synchronicity describes a meaningful coincidence—an inner psychic event and an outer physical event aligning in a way that feels charged with significance, yet cannot be explained through ordinary cause and effect. The famous example involves one of Jung’s patients recounting a dream of a scarab beetle, only to be interrupted by a scarab-like beetle tapping at the window pane.

    Jung wasn’t suggesting that the patient’s mind summoned or created the beetle. Instead, he proposed that both the mental effect (the dream) and the outer event (the window-tapping beetle) arise from a shared underlying pattern—an activated archetype strong enough to organize energy on both sides of the mind/matter divide.

    More precisely, he posited the existence of a unified field—an unus mundus—in which psyche and matter aren’t nearly as separate as they seem.

    If we combine this with von Franz’s suggestion that archetypes are excited points in the psychic field, we arrive at a compelling possibility: archetypes are excited points in a field that is both psychic and physical—the field in which synchronicity occurs.

    Now, here’s where my thinking departs from Jung. He would certainly accuse me of magical thinking—and he’d be right. I just happen to believe that magic is real. 😉

    Remember, for Jung, the mind does not create synchronistic events. The underlying archetype generates both the mental effect and the outer world event. But as a magical practitioner, this begs the question: what if the mind could participate in this process more intentionally?

    Jung gives us another juicy clue.

    He observed, time and time again, that whenever a synchronicity occurs, heightened emotions are present. A magical point of view might say that heightened emotions cause the synchronicity. In fact, Jung quotes a 13th-century magical text by pseudo-Albertus Magnus, De mirabilibus mundi, that makes precisely this claim—though Jung presents the passage in order to dispute it.

    In my witchy estimation, however, pseudo-Albertus offers a compelling argument:

    “When therefore the soul of man falls into a great excess of any passion, it can be proved by experiment that [the excess] binds things [magically] and alters them in the way it wants, and for a long time I did not believe it, but…I found that the emotionality of the human soul is the chief cause of these things…Thus it is the soul who desires a thing more intensely, who makes things more effective…Everything [the soul] does with that aim in view possesses motive power and efficacy for what the soul desires.” (CW 8, para. 859)

    So we know that during a synchronistic event, four things tend to cluster together:

    • An activated archetype

    • A mental effect

    • A physical event

    • Heightened emotions

    The question is: do they need to occur in a particular order?

    Activated archetype → mental effect → physical event → heightened emotions

    Or could we swap things around?

    Heightened emotions → mental effect → activated archetype → physical event

    Or perhaps:

    Heightened emotions → activated archetype → mental effect → physical event

    If we think synchronistically, as von Franz suggests, the order may matter less than the clustering together. She writes:

    “Synchronistic thinking…is thinking in fields, so to speak…The question is not why has this come about, or what factor caused this effect, but what likes to happen together in a meaningful way in the same moment…What tends to happen together in time?” (p. 8; emphasis mine)

    So if the order is less important, and we’re thinking in fields rather than tumbling dominos, then we’re no longer asking what causes what. We’re asking which variables we have the power to influence.

    Of course, magic already makes a claim here:

    That you can change your internal state and affect the outer world. But I’m perennially interested in the how. Instead of a theoretical physicist, you might call me a theoretical witchicist. I want to understand how magic works, and this field-based model feels like one plausible explanation.

    We can raise emotional energy. We can generate a focused mental effect. We can attempt to activate archetypal imagery.

    We might not be able to orchestrate a synchronistic dream on command, but we can consciously amplify intention (the mental effect). This is precisely what we do when drafting a spellcasting intention: we focus awareness and raise energy to empower a thought.

    That’s two factors successfully dialed up—what about the archetypal activation?

    This is tricky, because, by definition, archetypes are unconscious. The archetypes discussed in pop psychology and much magical discourse (things like the Great Mother or the Magician) are actually archetypal images; they’re not the archetypes themselves.

    This isn’t just semantics.

    Going back to our field model in which archetypes are activated nodes in the field, an archetypal image is like a flickering candle compared to the solar flare of the underlying archetype. We can ignite archetypal images fairly easily—perhaps by placing the Magician tarot card or a sculpture of the Great Mother on our altar and meditating on those images—but this is a far cry from firing up the deeper archetype.

    For that, we need ritual technology.

    Techniques like chanting, drumming, and meditating, or tools like sigils and other efficacious symbols that bypass the limitations of the conscious mind, have a better shot at penetrating those deeper layers.

    There’s no guarantee that fiddling with any of these dials will result in the outer world change/physical event we’re aiming for, but this is a viable framework for creating optimal magical conditions.

    Magic + Complexes

    Throughout this Creative Season, we’ve described psychological complexes as hubs within the psyche, and you might have noticed the parallels with our four synchronistic-magical ingredients.

    At the core of every complex is an archetype, which lights up when the complex is activated, thus coloring our perception of ourselves and the world around us.

    Mental effects and heightened emotions are two hallmarks of an activated complex, as we’ve seen in the book club scenario. You’re more likely to think your fellow book clubbers are excluding you when the complex is lit up (mental effect), and you’ll feel anxious, competitive, and self-conscious as a result (heightened emotions). These changes precipitate in the outer world, too, because the complex alters how you behave (physical event).

    Magically, by tweaking the levels of heightened emotions and mental effects, and using ritual tech to activate an archetype, we’re essentially building a complex. Only this time, we’re choosing which ingredients go in the cauldron.

    Add a Pinch of Black Hole Energy

    Remember, too, that if a complex gets powerful enough it behaves like a black hole. Every possible path leads to the complex’s foregone conclusion. Instead of adaptively choosing how to respond based on the situation at hand, the complex churns out habitual responses, often established in childhood.

    When we’re under the spell of an unwanted complex, this blows. But if we’re trying to set up our own magical “complex,” this very same mechanism becomes a superpower, making it more likely that events will lead to our desired outcome.

    This mirrors Theorem 18 in Aleister Crowley’s Magick in Theory and Practice:

    “[The magician] may attract to himself any force of the Universe by making himself a fit receptacle for it, establishing a connection with it, and arranging conditions so that its nature compels it to flow toward him.” (xviii; emphasis mine)

    Crowley’s example is digging a well. You choose a suitable location, prevent leakage, and work with physical laws governing water flow. You don’t dig at the peak of a desert mountain and demand that water appear. You optimize conditions. Magic, in this sense, is optimization within a structured field.

    You may have noticed that I’ve barely touched on the fourth ingredient in our archetypal activation soup: the physical event.

    Typically, that’s what we’re aiming for—a change in the external world. So we tinker with the other variables, like an algebra problem, hoping to influence the physical factor.

    But there’s another way to tweak the physical-event dial. It’s called sympathetic magic—and that’s where we’ll pick up next week.

  • Feeling stuck? Try this Qabalistic reframe.

    Feeling stuck? Try this Qabalistic reframe.

    Last week​, we ended with a question. If the psyche contains multiple organizing hubs—if the ego itself is but one complex among others—then perhaps the task is not the Sisyphean one of eliminating a complex, but switching which hub our psychic energy is gathering around.

    Let’s return to our Thursday night book club example. From inside the activated complex, the evening organized itself around one conclusion: “If I’m not exceptional, I’m not safe.”

    Seen through the complex’s goggles, every detail became “evidence.” Tia recounting a memorized passage like a veteran of the Shakespearean stage. Brent’s easy use of tongue-tangling terminology. Lana’s cryptic smile. All of it rolled downhill toward the same conclusion.

    Now, instead of trying to annihilate that conclusion in head-to-head combat (“just overwrite those limiting beliefs, bro!”), let’s walk off the battlefield.

    Let’s change vantage points using the Tree of Life.

    Think of each sephira not as mystical realms (though they might be that as well), but as distinct modes of organizing experience—just like complexes.

    We’ll try on Netzach first.

    Netzach corresponds to instinct, desire, and emotional immediacy…

    It’s too damn hot in here. The espresso machine shrieks, punctuating the conversation with a banshee’s wail. Your chai is volcanically hot, but you keep lifting it to your lips so you have something to do with your hands.

    Brent tilts back, elbow hooked over the chair. “Classic example of unreliable focalization,” he drawls, and everyone nods, your head bobbing right along, convinced everyone spots you for the phony you are.

    A bead of sweat slips down your ribs. And then there’s a pause, and in you dive, words spilling out faster than the speed of thought.

    You hear yourself drawing parallels to Madame Bovary, correcting someone’s reading of the cracked teacup symbolism. Is that really you, prattling on like a pompous ass?

    You’re no longer a reader among readers. You are a defendant making a case.

    This is one experience of Netzach: Immediate. Charged. You can feel the survival-level tension in the room—a tension that begins to shift when we view our fictional story from the perch of Tiphareth…

    Tiphareth’s bird’s-eye view lifts us from isolated scene to character arc.

    Here we see the pattern behind the pattern. Brent’s comment is no longer the whole story, but the trigger. A footnote in a bigger arc. From here, it’s easier to spot how quickly the main character—you—steps in with stories of worth and belonging.

    Maybe Brent is trying to flex his intellectual prowess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The deeper arc isn’t really about Brent’s character, though, which you can’t control; it’s about yours. The question shifts from Why is he making me feel this way? to Why does this pattern feel so familiar?

    The espresso machine continue to wail, you still don’t understand everything Brent’s saying, but something inside you has more room to breathe. You can choose to release the pressure to be in the know and ask a question instead. Or you might sit back and chill until you have something to share.

    More importantly, you can choose not to build your identity on intelligence as belonging. The “antagonist” shrinks. The true protagonist comes into focus.

    And then, if we dare to climb higher still, the story shifts again.

    From the vantage of Binah, we’re no longer watching a character wrestle with an old wound. We’re watching a theme unfold.

    Now the question isn’t merely about your personal history with grades and praise, nor Brent’s tendency to flex in public. It’s about a pattern older than either of you: The desire to be recognized as competent. To earn your keep. The fear of being cast out of the tribe.

    This scene has unfolded in monasteries and marriages, Parisian salons and political rallies. The book club isn’t charged because of your personal failings—it’s archetypal. It reveals recurring themes in our collective human story.

    In fiction, theme is not that tidy thesis statement you bludgeoned essays with in elementary school, complete with three supporting points, double-spaced, Times New Roman. Theme is the author’s working hypothesis about how one is meant to live. It poses questions that the story then explores, things like:

    Can belonging be granted or is it an inside job?

    Who gets to take up space?

    Is belonging more important than authenticity?

    From the height of Binah, your humble Thursday night book club participates in this larger inquiry. From this altitude, the café is no longer a courtroom. It’s a chapter in an age-old story about belonging.

    When the archetypal center shifts, meaning shifts. And when meaning shifts, behavior becomes less automatic. The black hole’s gravitational pull weakens—not because the complex has vanished, but because it’s no longer the only center of gravity.

    Do Try This at Home

    If you’re struggling with a conflict or question—at work, in a relationship, in your creative life—try a simple experiment.

    Describe the situation from the level of emotion. Let it be reactive, immediate, personal. Don’t worry about sounding judgmental AF. Let ’er rip.

    Bring your awareness to the “you” that exists within the limits of your body—feel the beating of your heart, the movement of your breath, the thoughts swirling “in” your head. Then, subtly shift your awareness right between your shoulder blades. Can you feel it gathering there? Maybe you notice the texture of your shirt against your skin.

    Push that awareness further back, about a foot, like you’re stepping behind yourself. Notice the subtle detachment that arises. If you’re not feeling it, energetically step back another foot, “seeing” the back of your head.

    Now, describe the situation again, this time imagining yourself as a character in a novel, and this situation is simply one scene designed to illustrate a larger character arc. What might that arc be? What is it arcing toward? If this character were to learn a valuable lesson by the book’s end, what is that lesson?

    Finally, imagine your awareness lifting up, up, up to rest on the roof of your house, looking down at you sitting in your chair, writing about this situation. If you were to take that character’s lesson and extract an insight that others might use to live a full life, what would that be? How does this lesson relate to our shared human journey?

    By shifting your perspective, you’ve traveled the Tree of Life, activating different levels of consciousness. In other words, you’ve just performed a potent act of magic, my friend.

    Next week, we’ll look at how this process could be used to create changes, not only in the mind, but in the physical world.

    See you then.

  • A backstage pass to your psyche

    A backstage pass to your psyche

    Last week, we sat in on a Thursday night book club, ending with the question: If a complex can severely narrow your perception—if it can bend every path to the same conclusion—are you trapped inside it?

    Jung’s answer is more complicated than “just change how you think!”

    A complex isn’t a psychological glitch; it’s an organizational hub within the psyche. Without such hubs, the psyche would be an undifferentiated blob. Without structure, there’d be no way for psychic energy to gather and move, and those “movements” are what we experience as life itself: thoughts and feelings, inspiration and ideas, creative impulses, philosophical reflections, awe, dread, longing.

    Complexes make experience possible.

    Pop psychology misses this entirely when it reduces complexes to “daddy issues” or limiting beliefs. A complex isn’t merely a wound; it’s an organizational center.

    To unpack this, we need to understand how Jung viewed complexes, starting with one that we all have: the ego.

    Yep. In a Jungian framework, the ego itself is a complex. But the “I” you experience as continuous and coherent is not the whole of the psyche. It’s one organized cluster of memory, affect, and beliefs among others. It functions as a center of gravity for waking consciousness—but, as we saw in our book club example, it’s not the only one.

    When another gravitational center activates—for instance, one organized around “If I’m not exceptional, I’m disposable”—our psychic movements (thoughts, feelings, interpretations) organize around that center instead. Everything funnels through it, and neutral cues acquire a specific charge. Ambiguous smiles become assessments of our worth, innocuous comments morph into passive-aggressive threats.

    Jung adds another crucial piece, one especially important for magical practitioners.

    At the heart of every complex lies something deeper than personal history. Complexes constellate around archetypal patterns—fundamental elements that recur across human life.

    Let’s go back to Thrusday night book club for a minute.

    On a personal level, the activated complex sounds something like: “If I’m not exceptional, I’m not safe.” In therapy, you might trace it back to childhood. The athletic superstar sibling who left you to corner the market on intellect unless you wanted to fade into the wallpaper. The day you brought home a B+ and your dad’s proud smile flickered—just for a second.

    Huh. Come to think of it, his expression looked a lot like Lana’s at book club. 🤔

    That personal belief is simultaneously plugged into something older, something shared by humanity.

    Belonging and exile. Hierarchy and status. Recognition and invisibility.

    Your biography gives the archetypal pattern a particular flavor, but the pattern itself isn’t private property. It recurs across families, workplaces, mythologies, and cultures. A complex always knits the personal and the collective together.

    So far so good? Now, let’s widen the lens.

    If the ego is one complex among many—one center of gravity within a larger system—then the psyche is not organized around a single point. It’s polycentric. Multiple hubs coexist, each capable of gathering experience around itself.

    When the “If I’m not exceptional, I’m disposable” complex activated, Thursday night book club became a battleground. One node in the psychic field seized control.

    But what if the same evening could organize itself around another pattern?

    Not around hierarchy, but around connection.

    Not around status, but around curiosity.

    Not around safety, but around growth.

    For that, we would need a different archetype, one that could serve as a different organizational hub within the psyche. Handily enough, esoteric systems have been providing us with rich archetypal systems for millennia, and one of my personal favorites is the Qabalistic Tree of Life.

    Here we have a network of archetypal nodes, connected by archetypal paths. It’s an archetypal buffet! Instead of attempting the impossible task of eliminating a complex, the Tree suggests a different move: repositioning.

    Through which archetype am I currently viewing this experience? And what might it look like from another POV? Instead of seeing book club through the lens of “If I’m not exceptional, I’m disposable,” what might it look like from the vantage of Netzach? Or Tiphereth?

    That, my magical friend, is where we’ll pick up next week.

  • Tarot & Tesseracts

    Tarot & Tesseracts

    Welcome to a crisp new Creative Season, fresh off the Twin Flames press!

    Our theme? As per the usual, we’ll be getting weird, exploring hidden connections between tarot and tesseracts, sympathetic magic and black holes, and more.

    But first, we need to pay a visit to an unsuspecting book club…

    When you saw the flyer at the local café—Cappucinos and Contemporary Fiction, First Thursday of the Month—you told yourself 2026 was the year you’d stop lurking online. You’d sign up for face-to-face conversations with actual humans.

    So you buy the book, you dutifully complete the reading, and you show up, your copy bristling with sticky tabs.

    You can’t miss them—they’ve pushed a few tables together—and while you wait for your chai latté, you take inventory from the corner of your eye.

    Eight people. No one you know.

    Although you recognize one of them, a literature professor from the local university. What was her name? You attended her talk at that indie bookstore. She’s articulate, funny, and seems supernaturally at ease in front of a crowd.

    This is good—great, even! It’s exactly why you came. You’re hungry for rigorous discussion and reasons to change out of your sweatpants. You might even meet a new friend or two.

    After brief intros, the conversation kicks off casually enough. Someone mentions the novel’s treatment of memory, and the professor—Lana—offers a quick aside about narrative temporality, referencing an author you haven’t read.

    You take a sip of your latté, shifting in your chair, trying to release that subtle, familiar tightening. Your knees press; you try to relax. Maybe you should chime in. Are you being too quiet?

    Tia quotes an entire passage from memory without even glancing at her copy.

    “Classic example of unreliable focalization,” Brent adds, everyone nodding in unison.

    Lana taps her chin. “It’s interesting how the narrative withholds interiority here. We’re close to the protagonist, but never quite inside her,” she says, before referencing a novel by W.G. Sebald you’ve only ever meant to read.

    Sweat trickles down your ribcage. You need to contribute something meatier than your inane comment about how “the ending felt ambiguous.”

    There’s a brief lull, and now, suddenly, you’re talking.

    You reference a New Yorker interview with the author. You outline a structural parallel to Madame Bovary. You correct someone’s interpretation of the cracked teacup as a symbol of fragility, suggesting instead that it represents social constraint, heat crawling up your throat. Now that you’ve said it aloud, you’re not entirely sure that’s what they were arguing in the first place.

    You can feel yourself droning on, but to peter off now, before you’ve made your point—that’s way worse. What’s your point, again?

    On the walk to your car, the narrative is already calcifying. You sounded like a douchey blowhard. It was obvious you hadn’t really understood the author’s intent.

    You replay Lana’s expression during your embarrassing little diatribe. Was that a flickering smile of pity? Contempt?

    You remember nothing of the drive home, but as you’re brushing your teeth you pull out your phone and cancel your order for next month’s book club pick.

    Woah—hold the phone. What just happened here?

    No one excluded you, not really. No one challenged your intelligence or suggested you didn’t belong. And yet, somehow, that’s exactly how it felt.

    A breezy, confident tone, one too many unfamiliar references, an ambiguous smile—these elements activated something with the power to transform a Thursday night book club into a much older drama.

    Jung called these charged clusters of memory, emotion, and belief complexes.

    A complex isn’t merely a thought like “I’m not smart enough.” It’s an organized network of associations gathered around a fundamental—and often unconscious—expectation of how the world works. Once activated, it reorganizes perception, spotlighting certain details and filtering out others. It supplies a ready-made narrative that eclipses competing facts.

    From inside a complex, you might not notice the takeover—frequently we don’t. You could feel more alert, convinced that you’re seeing what’s really going on. But something fascinating is happening under the surface: your interpretive landscape is bending around a hyper-charged center.

    Approaching the (psychic) event horizon

    Physics provides us with a metaphor that’s uncanny in its parallels: a black hole. So let’s shrug into our lab coats and nerd out for a sec.

    A black hole forms when a ginormous amount of mass collapses into a very small region of space. In Einstein’s model of gravity, mass doesn’t “pull” objects the way a magnet gathers iron shavings.

    It bends the fabric of spacetime itself.

    The more mass you compress into one place, the more extreme that bending becomes.

    Imagine a hammock. If you place a bowling ball in the center, the fabric sags. The more weight you add to the hammock, the deeper the sag. If you set a marble on the hammock, you can probably guess where it’s heading, right? Straight into the sag.

    At the start of this little experiment, a marble might escape if you gave it enough speed to roll down into the sag and up the other side. But once the dip becomes steep enough, no matter how hard you roll, every path slopes back toward the saggy center.

    In a black hole, that point of no return is called the event horizon. Once something crosses it, there’s no way back. Every possible path leads inward.

    And unfortunately, there isn’t a neon sign at the boundary, in case you change your mind. From close up, nothing appears to change, but structurally, the landscape has radically altered. The range of possible futures has narrowed to one.

    Psychologically, a complex functions in a similar way.

    When a core belief like “If I’m not exceptional, I’m disposable” becomes charged enough, experience curves around its psychic mass.

    And when the complex is activated, a comment, a tone of voice, a glance—everything rolls downhill toward the same conclusion: “If I’m not exceptional, I’m disposable.”

    From inside the complex, no other thoughts, feelings, or actions seem available. Your interpretive space has narrowed. And just as a black hole grows by gathering more mass, a complex grows by gathering more confirmation. Each time energy is added to that story, the curve deepens.

    In Jung’s experience, we can’t eliminate complexes; they’re structural features of the psyche. So is it hopeless? Do we simply let all our marbles roll downhill?

    What if the goal isn’t to eliminate psychic gravity—but to harness it? And what if doing so supercharged our magic?

    That’s where we’ll pick up next week.

  • 3 Habits of Productive Writers

    3 Habits of Productive Writers

    Welcome to the final installment of All the Writing Shit I’ve Learned Since My First Novel! Today is a bit of a junk-drawer roundup. So, without further ado…

    #1 Don’t Be a Big Ol’ Meanie to Yourself

    Learning to be a good steward of my energy—and adapting my work processes to fit my needs, rather than cramming my sparkly unicorn-shaped peg into a square hole—has been one of my biggest lessons. And, frankly, it’s still ongoing.

    To put it mildly, I haven’t always been great at listening to my body and spirit when it comes to work-life balance. I have a tendency to push, push, push, adhering to rigid to-do lists at the expense of my health. But 2025 was a year of slooooowing down and paying attention—something I plan to continue into 2026.

    One very practical application of this shift? I stop each writing session while I still feel energized. If you read a lot of craft books, you’ve probably encountered Hemingway’s advice:

    “The best way is to always stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck.”

    Ernest Hemingway on Writing

    Some writers stop in the middle of a sentence. Others leave off before the final paragraph of a chapter. Both approaches create an easy on-ramp the next day: finish the sentence, polish the paragraph. For me, it’s less about where I stop and more about how I feel when I do.

    In the past, total exhaustion was my signal to quit. Until I reached that frazzled, frustrated point of depletion, stopping felt lazy. This is like driving your car until you run out of gas on the side of the highway every single time. Not only is it wildly inefficient, it’s stressful, demoralizing, and—when we’re talking about a human rather than a car—punishing and cruel.

    Not cool, Past Me.

    ✍️ Now, I leave energy in the tank. And as Hemingway suggested, I make sure I know exactly where I’m picking up the next day. If I’m revising, I’ll highlight the next item in ​my revision checklist​. If I have a thought about how I want to approach an upcoming scene, I’ll leave myself a comment in Scrivener before closing up shop.

    These small adjustments make it a billion times more likely that I’ll be excited to get back to work tomorrow.

    #2 Cook Up a Juicy Premise

    One of the unexpectedly delightful parts of writing The Magician & the Labyrinth of Yesterdays (Twin Flames: Book One) has been the element of fanfic.

    The book is a parallel timeline to The Fool & the Threads of Time (Twin Flames: Book Zero), and this time, Ev Knox has finally published her debut novel.

    She’s floored when it becomes a runaway success—such a success, in fact, that the internet’s boyfriend, Matt Byrne, is cast as the lead in the film adaptation. Matt is the type of famous that has fans obsessively dissecting every social media post for clues about his fiercely guarded private life—especially his dating life—while producing reams upon reams of fanfic about him and his on-screen characters.

    After Ev meets Matt on set and finds him to be funny, sweet, and distractingly hot, she “stumbles” into the world of Matt Byrne fanfic. (Just a bit of harmless internet stalking!)

    Translation: not only did I get to invent fake movies for Matt to star in, I also got to come up with spicy fanfic premises based on those movies. Fake fanfic about a made-up character starring in made-up films. Deliciously meta. 🤤

    For one scene, I actually needed to write an excerpt of this fanfic, and oooowee, was that ever fun. So fun, in fact, I’ll be fleshing it out into a novella called Never Answer After Dark at some point.

    💡 Here’s what I noticed: some fanfic premises had sparkle, baked in from the start. I could explain them to a friend in a sentence or two, and had to actively resist getting sidetracked writing the whole damn thing.

    Contrast this with my experience explaining The Fool & the Threads of Time. It spans multiple lifetimes, so some complexity is inevitable, but I now recognize that the premise itself is also a bit sprawling.

    With Never Answer After Dark, I know exactly who the characters are, what the central conflict is, and what’s at stake if they fail—the three building blocks of a strong premise.

    With The Magician & the Labyrinth of Yesterdays, I got much, much closer to cooking up a juicy premise, but you better believe that with the next book, I’ll be spending even more time refining the premise at the outlining stage.

    A strong premise doesn’t just make a book easier to market, so the right readers instantly know, oh, this is so totally for me, it also makes the book easier to write. And hey, I’ll happily take both!

    #3 Notice When You’re Getting Lost in Busy Work

    One of the best things about writing—we’re usually working alone, doing things however we damn well please—can also be one of the worst things about writing. There’s no little writing angel perched on our shoulder, ready with a loving pinch when we’re frittering away time on bullshit. 👼🏾

    Sometimes we think we’re being productive, but to quote Tyler Durden in Fight Club, we’re just “polishing the brass on the Titanic.”

    This cropped up for me toward the end of Draft 4 of The Magician & the Labyrinth of Yesterdays. I’d just taken two weeks off during the height of ​my tiny food​ busy season before diving back in, ready to continue with my revision checklist.

    Because I’d been addressing a specific subsection of the manuscript (the group dynamics), I’d tackled things out of order. Now I was back at Chapter 1, ready to move through the manuscript from beginning to end. Even though this was not the stage for a careful line edit, I found myself obsessing over word choices and fiddling with superficials.

    What tipped me off was a familiar feeling of dissatisfaction at the end of my writing session, and I’ve learned to pay attention to that! Within ten minutes of sitting with it, the issue became clear:

    Two weeks away from the manuscript, combined with two drafts in a row focused on targeted revisions, meant it had been months since I’d done a full read-through. Those focused passes were absolutely necessary, but I’d reached a point where my sense of the whole had grown fuzzy. Without that big-picture orientation, my revisions were reactive and cosmetic rather than strategic.

    It felt like a massive win to realize this after a single day, instead of grinding forward for weeks, making changes that didn’t meaningfully improve the book, just so I could tell myself I’d been working.

    💡 Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is recognize that you’re no longer doing the work you think you’re doing and change course. Learning your own tells makes that much easier. Do you feel grouchy and dissatisfied? Do your thoughts feel slippery, like you can’t quite get a handle on what you’re doing or why? Do you find yourself procrastinating?

    You may not have a harp-playing angel perched on your shoulder, but your body, mind, and spirit are continually offering feedback. They’ll let you know when you’re forcing something that needs space, clinging to a rigid method that doesn’t fit you (or this particular project), or when you simply need to step away and rest.

    The challenge often isn’t getting the signals. It’s listening to them and choosing to honor what you hear.

    ✍️ Thank you for hanging out with me as I waded through my lessons learned! I hope this Creative Season has been as helpful for you as it has been for me.

    And now…I’m off to finish revising The Magician & the Labyrinth of Yesterdays! I’ll see you next time, for a brand new ​Creative Season​. 💖

  • Handling Messy Revisions

    Handling Messy Revisions

    Last week, I promised to break down my approach to revising the messy climax sequence in The Magician & the Labyrinth of Yesterdays, so let’s get into it…

    Timing Matters

    💡 First, it’s important to say what I didn’t do: I didn’t attempt this revision after the first draft, or even the third.

    Despite meticulous outlining, there’s always an element of surprise once I start writing. The first couple of drafts are about getting the story onto the page and stabilizing the plot. They’re exploratory by nature, even when I know where I’m headed.

    With The Magician, by Draft 4, something important had shifted. The characters’ progression through the climax sequence was mapped, at least in a physical sense. Everyone was showing up in the right place, at the right time, more or less doing the right things. I wasn’t likely to make radical structural changes at that point, which made it the right moment to drill down into specifics.

    💡 Just as importantly, I finally had the mental bandwidth to tackle this work. These climax revisions were a subset of the larger group-dynamics glow-up ​we talked about last time​, and trying to do all of that earlier would have been a recipe for burnout.

    Attempting to revise your story from too many angles at once is a reliable way to trigger overwhelm and procrastination. If revising feels like hell, narrowing your focus can make all the difference!

    Clear goals make it easier to sit your butt in the chair because you know exactly what you’re meant to tackle next, rather than scrolling through your manuscript with the vague intent of “revising.” Without a plan, it’s far too easy to lose yourself in line-level tweaks when larger plot or character-arc issues need attention first.

    Choosing a Draft Focus

    So how do you decide what to focus on in a particular draft?

    The frustrating but honest answer is: it depends—on you, on the project, and on where you are in the process. Not every book will follow the same progression.

    For me, I usually start to sense the focus of the next draft about halfway through the current one. In this case, while working through Draft 3, I noticed that too many of the side characters felt flat. That flatness showed up most clearly in the climax—the first time they’re all on page together—where the interactions felt cookie-cutter.

    ✍️ Rather than trying to address that during Draft 3, when I already had plenty of structural changes on my plate, I created a Draft 4 checklist. Whenever I spotted a revision related to side characters or group dynamics, I added it to my list and organized those notes by scene and character.

    This did two things: it kept me from getting sidetracked mid-draft, and it meant I entered Draft 4 with a clear, contained focus.

    Group Dynamic Plan

    Last week, I walked through how I built my group-dynamics outline: mapping both the arc of the group as a whole and the individual character arcs within it.

    I combined that outline with the checklist I’d been compiling during Draft 3, which gave me a master plan for my next draft: scene-by-scene, character-by-character, focused entirely on group dynamics.

    At that point, the question became less what do I need to fix? and more where do I start? 🤔

    Why I Started at the End

    Every project is different, but in this book, the side characters don’t appear together as a group until the climax. Because of that, it felt far more manageable to revise the climax sequence first and then tackle the rest of the book. By hammering out where the group ends up, I could clearly see what needed to be earned earlier.

    For example, knowing that Adrian eventually needs to relinquish control and trust other people made it obvious that I needed to show him grasping for control—and fearing trust—earlier in the story.

    Your brain could work very differently from mine, and revising out of order might sound like a nightmare to you. Adjust as needed!

    The real takeaway here isn’t start at the end, but rather: notice when your usual approach is creating unnecessary friction. I usually prefer working linearly, but in this case, insisting on that order was generating too much mental static. Once I adjusted my approach, those roadblocks turned into tumbling dominoes—one solution revealing the next.

    Breaking Down the Climax

    My climax sequence consists of 10 scenes. Simply telling myself “revise the climax” was far too blobby of a task. So I broke it down.

    ✍️ Working backward again, I started by revising Climax Scene 10 using my outline checklist. From there, I expected to move on to Scene 9, then Scene 8, but diving into Scene 9 felt like slamming into a brick wall.

    Once I paused and examined the resistance, the problem became clear: the climax alternates between action scenes and reaction scenes. Action scenes carry forward momentum—events, decisions, consequences. Reaction scenes process that momentum, emotionally and strategically, and my brain simply didn’t want to switch gears mid-revision.

    So I didn’t.

    ✍️ Instead, I worked backward through only the action scenes on my first pass. This small adjustment made the process feel intuitive and energizing instead of sloggy. Once the action backbone of the climax felt solid, I returned to the reaction scenes, this time revising from the beginning of the sequence to the end.

    My point in sharing such nitpicky details is to illustrate how you can combine a clear plan—my scene-by-scene checklist—and adapt when you meet resistance—huh, I actually need to start at the end—rather than letting things grind to a halt if they’re not working the way you expected.

    Expanding Beyond the Climax

    With the climax revised, I zoomed back out to the rest of the book—again, in a deliberately constrained way. Remember, Draft 4 was solely about group dynamics, and I used my checklist to guide the work. I didn’t get sidetracked by line edits, nor did I dive into other issues if they arose. Those were added to my Draft 5 checklist!

    ✍️ Starting at Chapter 1, I revised each character’s arc leading up to the climax, ensuring their individual goals and conflicts were clearly established before they converged.

    Once that groundwork was in place, I returned to the climax one final time to add any ripple effects—small details that now felt earned because the foundation was now established.

    Do Try This at Home

    When a scene or sequence feels impossible to revise, it might be because the problem is too big for your brain to comfortably hold. Books are complicated little beasties!

    Clear focus. Smaller tasks. Willingness to adjust when you hit resistance.

    These are the tools that turn a tangled ball of yarn into a puzzle your writerly brain actually enjoys solving. If you’re staring down a revision that feels overwhelming, my hope is that this gives you permission to shrink the problem until forward motion becomes possible again.

    Next week, we’ll wrap up this series on All the Writing Shit I’ve Learned Since My First Novel with a few more thoughts on outlining, revising, and bringing the spark back into your work.

    See you then!

  • Mapping Your Story’s Group Dynamics

    Mapping Your Story’s Group Dynamics

    Last week, I named one of the key archetypes animating my work: people coming together. Today, I want to show you what it looked like to actually build that on the page.

    After all, just because people coming together opens the floodgates for me doesn’t mean I’m automatically translating that depth of emotion into my story. There are scenes in my first novel, The Fool & the Threads of Time, I’d now revise, knowing what I know about building group dynamics—but that’s a task for another day!

    ✂️ Today, I want to show you how I divided this problem into manageable chunks, so I wasn’t trying to juggle a circus tent of details all at once.

    My exact process might not work for you, but the underlying principle still applies: once you identify the archetype you want to channel through your writing, you can break the work into doable, focused tasks.

    Coming up with a Game Plan

    Given that my chosen archetype was people coming together, I began by researching what other smart people already knew about group dynamics. This led me to improv theater, anthropology, ritual behavior, and a framework called Tuckman’s stages of group formation (among other cool stuff).

    I’d just finished Draft Three of The Magician & the Labyrinth of Yesterdays, and based on my research, I created a Draft Four outline focused entirely on group dynamics. Importantly, I didn’t aim to fix anything else in this draft.

    I wasn’t polishing the haunting subplot and fixing the opening chapter and tightening Ev’s character arc.

    💡 Draft Four was about group dynamics—full stop. This constraint kept me from getting overwhelmed and throwing in the towel.

    If you find yourself spinning, it may be time to narrow your focus. Trying to revise everything at once is a reliable way to do nothing—or to redo scattered efforts later, which can be pretty demoralizing.

    Mapping the Arc of the Group

    I approached the outline in two phases: mapping the arc of the group as a whole, and mapping the arcs of individual characters within it.

    ✍️ Using Tuckman’s stages—forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning—I mapped the emotional trajectory of the group across the story, relative to the main plot beats. This immediately solved a recurring problem: scenes where characters were technically present, but nothing progressed relationally.

    Once I started asking, What stage is the group in right now?, the scene-level choices became clearer. I didn’t force scenes to match the stages mechanically, but holding them in mind helped me figure out which seeds needed to be planted where and kept me from rushing emotional payoffs the story hadn’t earned.

    This became especially important when building the climax sequence, which we’ll talk about next week.

    Defining Roles Without Erasing Difference

    Once I’d mapped the group’s arc, it was time to define each character’s role within it. Some of this work existed in earlier outlines or was already on the page, but studying group dynamics pushed me to go further, especially around contrast and conflict.

    It made little sense to have multiple characters performing the same function, like several people diffusing tension with humor, but it’s not always easy to spot this overlap in your own story. You get attached to the characters’ personalities, overlooking that they’re functionally redundant.

    I also knew—based on why the people coming together archetype hits so hard for me, personally—that unity without difference would drain the archetype of its numinous quality. To keep the magic alive, I had to build a group powered by contrasting personalities and conflict, showing why the characters chose to work together.

    ✍️ To make my job easier, I assigned Enneagram types as a shorthand for how each character would respond under stress. This helped me map each character’s arc in relation to the group.

    For example, in The Magician & the Labyrinth of Yesterdays, Adrian is an Enneagram 8. Early in his arc, his reflex is to shut down vulnerability and take control, which puts him in direct conflict with Inés.

    As an Enneagram 7, she’s oriented toward vision and possibility; she wants to steer the group because she’s already living a few steps ahead, impatient with anything that feels like stagnation or constraint.

    Over time, they learn how to use those same instincts in service of the group. Adrian’s impulse to take control evolves into an ability to steady the group under pressure, while Inés’ vision and forward momentum helps them push through fear that might otherwise stall their quest.

    And crucially, when individual strategies break down, this creates space for someone else to step in. When Inés spirals, it’s Margot, whom Inés has dismissed as a hopeless nerd, who brings her back to the present. Those moments build trust and strengthen the group’s bonds—in other words, they channel that people coming together energy I’m after.

    Keeping Track of Who’s Doing What

    One of my biggest practical concerns with a large group was accidentally dropping threads, and in doing so, missing opportunities to earn the emotional impact of people coming together.

    ✍️ So, I did something unglamorous but effective: I listed every scene by character, creating a checklist of revisions specific to that character’s arc within the scene.

    Even if a character only had a line or two, those lines needed to count. They needed to advance the character’s individual arc alongside that of the group, bringing to life a person with their own goals, hopes, and fears—someone who exists independently of the protagonist.

    This isn’t just about avoiding cardboard cutouts.

    It’s about making sure that when the group finally does come together, it feels earned. When a character steps up in a critical moment, the reader shouldn’t be thinking, Oh right, that person exists.

    They should experience the swelling recognition of seeing someone they know choose differently, feeling, in their bones, that this is the moment the character has been growing toward.

    It’s the person who’s always handled things solo—the fixer, the one who never wants to be a burden—realizing they can’t brute-force their way through this one. The plan is unraveling. Time is running out. And instead of pushing harder…they stop. They take a breath. And they finally admit, I can’t do this alone.

    Someone leans in, noticing the tremor in their hand, and steadies the map before helping to find a new escape route. Someone else flips through the grimoire and finds the spell that changes everything. Another person doesn’t say anything at all; they simply move closer, anchoring with a quiet hand on a shoulder.

    The character doesn’t become weaker for asking; they become part of something larger. And that—that shift from isolation to interdependence—is what turns on the people coming together waterworks for me, every single time. 😭

    Untangling a Knotty Climax

    Next time, I want to show you how I tackled revising a climax sequence that initially felt impossible to hold in my head—especially with the whole group in play—and how I transformed it into a puzzle I actually enjoyed solving, one piece at a time.

    If you’re wrestling with scenes that feel too messy to revise, this one’s for you.

    See you next week.

  • Finding Your Secret Sauce as an Author

    Finding Your Secret Sauce as an Author

    Over the past month or so, we’ve been talking about pacing, story goals, and stakes, but I want to pause and get personal today, because the kinds of stories we’re drawn to aren’t arbitrary.

    They’re often expressions of archetypes that carry real charge for us as individuals, whether we’ve named them or not.

    When you identify the archetypes that speak deeply to you, they become wellsprings of surprisingly potent energy, and when you channel this energy into your writing, you’re not manufacturing meaning—you’re tapping into something that’s already alive.

    Throughout my 2025 adventures in learning how to improve my pacing and romantic tension, at one point I set aside all the craft books and post-its and asked myself, What actually matters to me when I’m writing? Like flicking on a movie projector, I was flooded with images and sensations, all woven together by a crystal-clear theme.

    My personal archetype is…

    My One Ring to Rule Them All is People Coming Together. (Henceforth, I shall call it PCT, so I don’t have to keep typing that out.) This is any depiction of folks choosing to work together for the betterment of everyone.

    I can read the driest, most textbook-y description of a PCT scenario, and I’ll be dabbing my eyes with a tissue.

    I can watch a car commercial with a dash of PCT and straight up happy-cry. And if they really slather it on, it’s more like happy sobbing.

    This archetype is so readily accessible to me that I have to choose when to engage it, or I’ll end up weeping in grocery store aisles. Really, weeping is shorthand for a whole constellation of sensations: my heart swells with warmth and compassion, and my body hums with love, generosity, and a sense of this is what it means to be human.

    Not all forms of togetherness hit me the same way, though.

    To understand why, we need to time travel back to my childhood, where PCT energy came with a catch. In my family, connection was available, but only if you were willing to pay the price. You could belong if you denied large swathes of yourself and merged with the blob. It wasn’t togetherness so much as absorption.

    You could be part of the group, but only if you sacrificed your selfhood.

    It took me decades to realize how profoundly lonely this form of “connection” was. Being together meant disappearing. It meant divorcing myself from my inner world, because that world contained messy things that could disrupt the blob. There was no room for meaningful difference.

    💡 Which is why, for me, the most potent charge of PCT isn’t just unity. It’s unity through difference.

    Each person brings their own shape, their own strangeness, their own way of being, and the collective becomes stronger because of it, not in spite of it.

    When I obey my old programming—difference is dangerous—I feel chronically unsafe, cynical, and angry at the world. (And if you want to see this fear writ large, turn on the news.)

    But when I look for ways to honor differences while still working together, something shifts. Sometimes only for a minute or two, but that’s often enough. After all, miracles aren’t bound by ordinary space and time.

    When I live from this place, the world hums with connection. When I cast spells from this place, they work. And when I write from this place, the words feel alive.

    This is what matters to me when I’m writing, and it’s why group dynamics keep showing up in my stories. By learning how groups form, strain, fracture, and learn to function together—and how to translate this onto the page—I’m becoming a more competent channel for this personally meaningful archetype.

    This imbues my writing with a greater sense of purpose and meaning, which is wonderful in and of itself, and it’s also handy on days when I can find a million excuses not to sit my butt in the chair.

    When we identify the archetypes that matter to us personally, we gain clarity.

    We stop fearfully copying other people’s formulas in hopes of “getting it right,” and start channeling something that already has energy, coherence, and life. This opens up avenues of research, skills-building, and story that you’re uniquely motivated to explore. These threads seem to glow, to beckon you onward, and no two people will be drawn to the exact same ones.

    When you follow these threads, your writing glimmers with a magic only you can bring into the world, and I don’t know about you, but those are the kinds of books I want to read!

    Next time, I want to stay with this idea and show how I translated this meaningful archetype into concrete choices on the page so you can do the same in your work.

    See you then.

  • Avoid These Subplot Snafus

    Avoid These Subplot Snafus

    Today we’re exploring the magic of subplots, because when handled skillfully, they pass the baton of tension from one story thread to the next, never letting it lag.

    Mishandled subplots stall a story, and this pitfall has very little to do with how interesting a subplot is on its own. In fact, the more interesting the subplot, the more likely you, as the author, will struggle to discern whether it truly adds to the story.

    Let’s call on trusty Sir RidesALot to help us out.

    Avoid episodic subplots

    Sir RidesALot encounters a village plagued by a vicious bridge troll. Not one to leave innocents at the mercy of monsters, he stops and battles the beast. The fight is a well-choreographed nail-biter, and when Sir RidesALot swings his sword one final time, dashing the troll off a mile-high cliff, the villagers swoon with gratitude. Sir RidesALot mops off his brow and rides on toward the castle, satisfied by a job well done.

    On the surface, this is dramatic, it shows Sir RidesALot’s competence, and it may even be memorable. But nothing has really changed. Sure, the troll is gone and the villagers are safe, but once Sir RidesALot crests the next hill, the subplot seals itself off. We return to the main plot, which is entirely unchanged by this trollish diversion.

    These side quests lose their power when they merely enrich the protagonist’s résumé without altering the trajectory of the story.

    Skillfully weave compounding subplots

    ✍️ This time, let’s change nothing about the surface action, but get this subplot working much harder for the story.

    Sir RidesALot gallops into the village and vanquishes the troll. Afterward, while enjoying his congratulatory meal at the local pub, the villagers reveal something unsettling: the bridge troll wasn’t an anomaly. In this once-peaceful region, monsters have become frighteningly common, such that a third of the villagers have already packed up and moved.

    Suddenly, the bridge troll isn’t a one-off worry. It’s a sign of a bigger problem.

    Oh, and did I mention that Old Mister Thorndike, once he’s had an ale or five, starts ranting about Count McFang meddling with forces best left alone, weakening the magical wards separating our realm from the Underworld?

    Even if, at this point in the story, Sir RidesALot doesn’t know about his eventual showdown at Count McFang’s castle, these details seed that future conflict, a conflict that will feel earned and satisfying to readers when those threads converge.

    And if he’s already en route to the castle? This disturbing intel lays the groundwork for the eventual reveal: that McFang intends to use Sir Beloved as a magical battering ram to break down those protective wards for good, overrunning the mortal world with creatures that will make that bridge troll look like the Easter Bunny.

    Even after we leave the village, pressure remains. The journey to the castle is no longer a simple race against time, but a narrowing corridor of worsening conditions. The story doesn’t reset—it tightens.

    This is what effective subplots do, and one useful way to think about them is as a river. Your main plot is the river’s current. Subplots shouldn’t be calm, isolated ponds ten miles from the bank. They should be tributaries feeding the same flow, and each time we return from a subplot, the main current should be stronger than before.

    By the time you reach the climax, the river has swollen into white-water rapids. The outcome feels inevitable not because it was predictable, but because everything has been pushing in that direction all along, even if the reader didn’t know it at the time.

    What about static subplots?

    What if your subplot isn’t a village-ravaging troll, and it’s more of a throughline that doesn’t change much throughout the story?

    For instance, in my upcoming book The Magician & the Labyrinth of Yesterdays, Ev Knox’s financial woes is one subplot. I’m being a bit vague to avoid spoilers, but essentially, there’s a big ol’ bill she needs to pay by a certain date, and she doesn’t have the money.

    I need to return to this subplot from time to time—I can’t just mention it once and then drop the subplot until the bill is due. Not only would it be highly unlikely for Ev to think of this massive problem once and never again, but dropping this subplot ensures that the reader will forget all about it. When the subplot concludes, rather than the reader eagerly wondering if Ev will succeed or fail, it will feel like a whole bunch of nothing.

    But given the subplot’s static nature, how do I keep the financial subplot from feeling tiresomely one note?

    ✍️ Let’s retrofit our river metaphor to show how you can keep a subplot feeling fresh and propulsive, even when the surface details aren’t changing much or at all.

    This time, think of the river as the character’s arc. If Ev is changing throughout the story, even if she steps into the river at the same exact spot—financial worries—it’s no longer the same river, because she’s not the same person she was 10, 20, or 100 pages ago.

    What does this look like in practical terms?

    At different points, the very same money pressure might lead Ev to:

    • Question whether she’s staying in her relationship for financial security, triggering guilt and anxiety.
    • Fear repeating those patterns in a future relationship.
    • Try to scrounge up the cash, perhaps by selling off precious heirlooms or taking out a loan.
    • Confront the erosion of her self-efficacy as she realizes that, as a grown-ass adult, she can’t fully support herself.

    The problem hasn’t changed, but Ev has, and where she is relative to both the main plot and her character arc will determine her experience each time she steps into the river.

    Next time, I want to reveal a hidden current that kept tugging at my stories, quietly shaping them without my awareness—and what changed when I finally named it.

    See you then.

  • Your Story’s Gotta Have These…or Else

    Your Story’s Gotta Have These…or Else

    Today we’re talking about stakes. Not the kind you drive through Count McFang’s heart—the kind that keeps readers turning pages.

    Last time, we explored how clear goals orient the reader and create momentum, and while goals are necessary, they’re not sufficient. You can know exactly what a character wants and still end up with a flatlining story if failure doesn’t cost anything meaningful, or if those costs never increase.

    That’s where stakes come in.

    What stakes actually do

    At their core, stakes answer a simple question: What changes if the character succeeds or fails? And just as importantly: Is that change meaningful? If failure mildly inconveniences the character or ends up helping them in the long run, the story trains the reader not to worry.

    Let’s return to Sir RidesALot to see how this plays out.

    Sir RidesALot needs to rescue his lover, Sir Beloved, from Count McFang’s castle. That’s a clear goal with obvious stakes: if he fails, Sir Beloved will be lost.

    But let’s look at how an author might flub the obstacles Sir RidesALot encounters on his quest, steadily leaking air out of the balloon, resulting in a flaccid story.

    Sir RidesALot takes a risky shortcut through the forest and is bitten by a wolf—curse ye, furred demon!—but the injury conveniently slows him just enough to overhear crucial information. He sneaks toward the castle and is spotted by guards—blast!—but manages to slip away unharmed. He interrogates a servant in search of another way in, but the servant lies—foul wretch!—only for him to stumble upon a forgotten drainage tunnel hidden behind a tangle of briars, and it leads straight to the castle’s storage rooms.

    On paper, plenty is happening—danger! Setbacks! But every failure resets the board. Nothing is truly lost. Each stumble either resolves cleanly or nets Sir RidesALot an unexpected boon. He ends every chapter with just as many tools, allies, and possibilities as he had before—sometimes more.

    (If you think this only happens in my absurd examples, trust me…I had a stack of published books I could have used to illustrate the point.)

    After enough repetitions, the reader knows the drill: he’ll be fine. Even if the story insists the danger is dire, the structure tells a different tale. The tension evaporates, the pace grinds to a halt, and the book inches ever closer to the DNF pile.

    Be horrid to your character—like, really horrid

    ✍️ Let’s make things a whole lot worse for Sir RidesALot, shall we?

    This time, that festering wolf bite on his ankle hurts like a bitch and he’s slowed to a stumble. He misses the guards’ shift change making the hidden route he planned to use no longer viable.

    The servant not only lies but runs straight to Count McFang, hoping for a reward in exchange for their tattling, and now the Count is hip to the rescue attempt. Sir Beloved is dragged deeper into the castle, with four more hell hounds posted outside his cell.

    Oh—and one thing the servant didn’t lie about? The reason Count McFang captured Sir Beloved in the first place.

    The Count has learned Beloved’s true surname. As a descendant of the ancient Line of Aurelion, his blood amplifies magic like a match tossed into a barn full of gunpowder. If Count McFang completes the blood ritual on tomorrow’s full moon, turning Sir Beloved into a vampiric battery, he’ll be able to raise an undead army and turn the entire country into his personal feeding grounds, one ravaged village at a time.

    Well, now.

    Sir RidesALot is no longer leisurely regrouping and having another go whenever he damn well feels like it. One door after another slams in his face as the country careens toward a bloodbath, his Beloved standing squarely in the crossfire.

    This is escalation.

    Why we tank our story’s stakes

    Sometimes, as writers, we fail to escalate the stakes, not because we don’t understand the importance, but because doing so makes the story harder to write. 😮‍💨

    What began as a simple chess move—get Sir RidesALot from the forest to the castle’s hidden entrance—is now a jagged path through a vampiric hellscape. Escalation complicates everything. Plans break. Timelines shift. Entire sections have to be rethought.

    And when that realization hits mid-draft, it’s tempting to postpone the reckoning. I’ll fix it in revision. Or maybe the next revision. Or the next. Until we’re so tired of looking at this story that it quietly joins the growing heap of abandoned drafts.

    Learning to escalate stakes often means working with the discomfort this escalation creates—on the page and in the writing process—because the moment you allow failure to truly matter, the story stops behaving nicely.

    But hidden within that mess is vital story energy that paradoxically makes your job as a writer easier. Instead of trying to manufacture emotional impact with overwrought prose or contrived plot twists, your readers feel something because they want to know whether your character succeeds at their goal—and rising stakes make it crystal clear why that success matters.

    When that energy hums through your scenes, that’s the tug of a well-paced story.

    Next time, we’ll look at one of the most powerful tools for managing that energy over the course of a book.

    See you next week.