The Chopping Blog

Think of generative AI as your creative assistant—excellent at organizing ideas and enhancing brainstorming but not equipped to direct the show.

All fiction is autobiographical in the sense that your characters and story world are drawn from your lived experience of people and places.

But does this count as plot? Doesn’t plot require a protagonist? Doesn’t plot require an inciting incident, an arc, and a climax?

If you give your protagonist an internal conflict, they will feel authentic to the reader, and you will create an essential connection between reader and protagonist that is at the heart of all engaging stories.

Honor the tiny beat and it will carry the weight of a whole character for you.

Patchett writes about something that is very hard to make interesting: the triumph of goodness over evil. Her tricks: the use of tension, and the transformation of character.

Sanderson's masterful intertwining of family dynamics with the epic fantasy setting offers a rich, multi-layered narrative experience that showcases his ability to blend personal motivations with grand-scale storytelling.

In crafting The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho dared to prioritize narrative context—in this case his personal philosophy—over traditional story elements like subplots and character development.

The complexity that we would normally find in subplots instead takes the form of extensive world-building.

An engaging memoir, while rooted in reality, employs the same narrative devices that make novels compelling.

The counsel to "kill your darlings" has been repeated many times by many editors, writers, and writing instructors.

External conflict is essential to keeping the story moving, but it's the internal conflicts of your characters that make the reader care.