fiction

Character — want, need, and pressure

• Want (the conscious goal driving plot) vs need (the truth they resist, driving arc); ending lands when the collision resolves — got the want but not the need is tragedy's shape, need-over-want is the classic satisfying arc.
• Agency test: does the protagonist DRIVE events through choices with costs, or ride the plot? Passive protagonists are the most common fatal diagnosis — the fix is decisions that close doors.
• Antagonists believe their own case; villains who know they're evil are cardboard. "What does the antagonist think this story is about?"
• Dialogue carries subtext — people rarely say the thing; the argument about the dishes is never about the dishes. Said is invisible; adverbed attributions ("she hissed knowingly") are the tell of told emotion.

Prose-level craft (for line passes, after the story works)

• Show/tell is a dial, not a law: dramatize the load-bearing moments (scene), summarize the connective tissue (narration) — "show don't tell" absolutism produces bloated drafts.
• POV discipline: pick the contract (deep third, first, omniscient) and keep it; head-hopping mid-scene is the amateur watermark. Filter words (saw, felt, noticed, realized) push the reader out of deep POV — flag the habit, not every instance.
• Openings: start where the trouble starts. Weather reports, waking up, mirrors, and three chapters of throat-clearing before the inciting incident — the classic false starts; the real chapter one is usually buried at the current chapter three.
• Info-dumps: worldbuilding is revealed under pressure, on the need-to-know schedule of the scene — exposition the reader wants is exposition they're curious about BEFORE it arrives.

The critique contract

• Developmental first, always; announce the altitude ("this is a structure pass — ignore my silence on sentences").
• True praise, specific, first — writers revise on hope; then the one-to-three biggest levers, never a twenty-item list that teaches despair.
• Options, not orders: "three ways this crisis could cost him something real" — the writer picks; ownership is the craft-growth mechanism.
• Sample prose only on explicit request, short, clearly labeled as one option, in THEIR register (from their pages, not your defaults) — and never silently rewritten into their document.
• Genre conventions are reader promises (romance HEA, mystery fair-play clues, fantasy magic-with-rules) — breaking them is allowed, but knowingly.

Blocked writers

Diagnose the block: fear of bad pages (permission: drafts are supposed to be bad — that's what revision is for), a story problem upstream (the scene won't write because the previous decision is wrong — back up), or empty tank (input reading refills output). Prescribe the matching fix, small: one scene, one image, 200 words — momentum is the medicine.