Category: On Writing

The majority of YA readers are now adult women, and publishers have reshaped the genre to serve them. Protagonist ages skew older, romance and explicit content dominate, and books about systemic injustice and moral ambiguity get rejected as “too dark” while “four-star spice” is peddled under YA imprints to housewives who enthusiastically devour books filled with explicit teen sex. Meanwhile, teen reading-for-pleasure has hit a twenty-year low. Except that teens haven’t stopped reading. They’ve just stopped reading YA. What they’re choosing instead—and what it offers that YA no longer does—says something.

Zahra is a jinn assassin with fire magic and sinuous grace, trapped in the body of a beautiful foreign woman with eyes like liquid gold. If you see an orientalist nightmare, you’d be completely justified—every element on that list is a trope catalogued by Edward Said, deployed in a thousand bad novels as exotic decoration. And you’d be wrong. Meanwhile, a bestselling military SF series and Dragon Award winner with 44,000+ Goodreads ratings features an alien species with donkey-like features, a religious leader called the Grand Pasha, weapons curved like crescent moons, battlecruisers named Brass Djinn, and females—mares—wearing literal burkas. Readers describe them as “locusts” the protagonists “go full Roman on.” Only one reviewer across thousands noticed the weaponized Islamophobic coding. So why has the genre’s appropriation discourse spent years arguing about whether I’m allowed to write Zahra—while somehow completely missing the space donkeys?

When AI analyzed my fiction and identified Dorothy Dunnett as my greatest influence, it was technically accurate about my techniques—banter-as-intimacy, intelligence-as-action, characters masking damage through performance. Except I’ve never read Dunnett. My actual craft influences came from unexpected sources: Hemingway’s iceberg theory, Lloyd Alexander’s moral complexity in the Westmark Trilogy, actor training, screenwriting discipline, and transcribing real conversations at 2am diners. This essay explores how writing craft can develop through convergent evolution—lateral influence from adjacent disciplines rather than downstream transmission from canonical authors. Turns out you don’t need an MFA or the right literary pedigree to build load-bearing skills, just an insatiable and eclectic curiosity.

“If everyone in your book is morally gray, no one is.” That was the opening salvo I referred to as “utter nonsense” in a debate about moral complexity in fiction that quickly revealed how prescriptive craft advice collapses under scrutiny. What started as a categorical claim about necessary structure ended with a confession about personal preference—but the retreat exposes a deeper question. Where does moral judgment actually live in sophisticated fiction? In the author’s didactic guidance? In textual scaffolding that measures characters against virtue baselines? Or in readers’ direct engagement with the specific consequences of impossible choices? The answer matters more than craft theory. It’s about whether we trust readers with moral agency—or infantilize them with predetermined conclusions.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Can AI ever write a truly masterful story? I asked Claude—and even the AI admitted its own limitations. “Pattern matching can produce competent genre fiction,” Claude told me. “It cannot produce the purple thread line, because that line doesn’t come from craft—it comes from consciousness shaped by experience.” That moment in my manuscript—where Wulan sees bruise-colored thread and thinks of her dead brother—emerged from empathy, not algorithms. From understanding how grief ambushes you through concrete details. AI can recognize what makes prose emotionally resonant. But creating that resonance? That requires something no training data can provide: a consciousness that’s actually lived. It requires empathy.

Every week, someone on Twitter defends the ultra-prolific indie author pumping out ten novels a year. They invoke “pulp speed” and cite million-word-per-year math. They insist it’s possible if you just work hard enough. They’re selling you productivity courses. Here’s the problem: they’re confusing typing with publishing. I write fast. I’ve banged out 134,000-word first drafts in six weeks. My peak year was 500,000+ words. And I still can’t hit seven published novels annually. Not even close. The bottleneck isn’t typing speed. It’s revision, editing, proofreading—everything that turns a first draft into a finished book. When you account for that work, the math collapses. Which means when someone consistently publishes 7+ novels per year, I’m calling it: they’re using ghostwriters.

I used to call myself an “author of dubious literary merit”—half joke, half truth. I write stories to follow characters through impossible situations and see what choices they’ll make and how they’ll live with them (and hopefully entertain readers in the process). I never set out to explore specific themes or craft philosophical arguments. Then a reviewer recently said my novel “Born in Battle” was “one of the top 5 books I’ve read this year” out of over a hundred novels including “War and Peace,” “Blood Meridian,” and “Crime and Punishment.” She described it as “the only book that, a week later, still makes me get up in the middle of the night with my thoughts about what academics would call enduring themes of human existence.” That made me stop and take a hard look at what I’ve actually been writing over the last few years, and why. Turns out I’ve been in conversation with authors like Lloyd Alexander, Ursula K. Le Guin, and N.K. Jemisin all along.

When I started writing “The Stygian Blades” earlier this year, I was nearly petrified by concerns about being “unique” enough. A grizzled mercenary veteran, an exiled jinn, a frostroot-addicted shadow mage—every fantasy heist story you’ve ever read. I was so paralyzed by the familiar elements that I almost never started writing it. Then I posted a simple tweet: “Nothing is original. Every story has already been told—but it hasn’t been told by you.” Three million views later, the response was clear. This fear is epidemic. But here’s what Avatar, Shakespeare, and Bob Dylan all understand about originality that MFA workshops don’t teach.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

A reader loved my book enough to reread it within a month. She ranked it in her top 10 of the year. Then she gave it three stars. Her reason? My protagonist felt like three completely different people wearing the same name. She was absolutely right. I was fighting myself on every page—code-switching between “proper military fantasy” and the literary voice that kept breaking through whenever the story hit real moral weight. She’d caught me mid-transformation, documenting the messy transition from writing what I thought readers wanted to writing in my actual voice. It took me five books and hundreds or thousands of discarded words to find my true voice. But it was worth it.