On learning how to research (by writing porn)

This is the third in a series relating to how writing sex in fiction is beneficial to you as a writer. The previous post can be found here.

The last two topics were about a writer’s personal attitude — first in unlearning shame which would make using words difficult, and the second in learning to love indulgence. This third one is similar: it’s about getting comfortable with research, which is very much an attitude as well as a learned skill.

Research is often where a good writer spends the majority of their time. It’s very easy to get lost in the weeds (and sometimes incredibly fun), but that isn’t necessarily helpful to your writing. And that’s assuming a writer knows they need to research.

Most people are aware whether or not they’ve had sex, either with another person or with themselves, and therefore are generally aware of the areas in which they lack experience thanks to the physiology they have (and the physiology they don’t). As an immediate experience, ‘what do I know about sex’ is easy to define, assuming even a modicum of self-awareness.

The benefit of researching sex is that it’s a huge topic with a lot of discrete subjects in it. Do they interrelate? Oh my, yes. But generally speaking it’s easier to parcel one sex act away from another sex act and research that, and stop when you’re getting off topic, than it is to go looking for, say, an ancient language appropriate for magical wards and then get lost in the weeds of history and linguistics because you don’t know whether you might find what you need just tangentially in a given page.

Moreover, there’s a great wealth of information about sex, so a writer isn’t likely to be lost for a lack of resources. They might still get lost in the wealth of information: but that’s where learning how to look only for what you need and then closing the tab comes in.

So, ‘what do I know about sex’ is a good lead-in. However, an even better question is ‘what do I know about how sex feels’, because it turns the subject descriptive instead of informational: if a writer has never had sex and doesn’t know how it feels, then they at least know where to begin.

This is an important framing in particular for any kind of research, because a lot of writing is about how a thing feels. Small things create depth: how does the breeze feel, how does this conversation feel, how does it feel to be hurt or to be comforted.

A writer deals in feelings, in the context of sensations as well as emotions. Sex is about feelings in most kinds of applicable contexts. Writing a good sex scene isn’t enough to simply research the physical acts of it, but how it feels to the individual.

Individuals are all unique. A man will have a different sensory experience than a woman. Someone whose gender doesn’t match their genitals will have a different emotional experience than someone who doesn’t have that dissonance. Someone whose body is partially immobile will have a different physical experience to someone who is fully mobile.

A writer who is not aware how a given experience feels has to research it, by figuring out who might have that experience and looking for stories, anecdotes and information told by them. Because physical pleasure is a sensation capable of being shared by most people, sex as a topic provides a unifying way of thinking about people not like you, and doing so from their perspective.

(Writing about the pleasure of someone not like you from your perspective is called a fetish. It has its place, and is also very easily misused. Learning the difference between that and genuinely writing about a given individual is extremely important if you’re not looking to artificially exclude a given subset of your audience.)

When a writer is researching, they need to know whether or not they’re just looking up data, or understanding a sensation. They’re different kinds of research, for different purposes. The topic of sex provides an opportunity to learn both while also being a gateway to think about the broadness of human experience, and therefore the potential diversity of your characters.

On learning how to write for yourself (by writing porn)

This is the second in a series on how writing sex in fiction can help your development as a writer. The first, ‘On deconstructing shame’, can be found here.

Like the previous, this post is more about attitude than it is about technique. This is on purpose: a lot of the trouble writers have when approaching their writing has more to do with how they feel about their writing than the writing itself. Unlearning some bad and societally-enforced emotional habits is vital to a writer continuing to write — and enjoying it.

That’s today’s topic. When was the last time you, as a writer, was afraid to write something in case it wasn’t like, well-received, or you didn’t think your readers wanted it? And this is as applied to writing in general. When you think about writing, how often do you think about your enjoyment of it, or write purely for the indulgence?

Many writers, especially starting writers, are more concerned with what the audience thinks rather than what do I think. Don’t forget that you are also part of your own audience. How can you expect anyone else to be invested in your writing in a good way if you’re not invested in it either?

I mentioned earlier that there’s no stipulation on having to show your writing to anyone. That’s not just if you decide to try your hand at writing porn, and in many cases I do believe it’s best to keep your writing secret and safe to preserve your enthusiasm for it. When it comes to writing porn I especially think it’s wiser to start from a position of showing no one, not out of shame but out of intimacy.

Let’s be honest: writing sex is an indulgence. If you haven’t read much of my stuff before, then know that I don’t use the word ‘indulgence’ as a bad word. Generally speaking I refuse delivery of the notion that we should feel ashamed or guilty about enjoying ourselves in any given context. But when it comes to a story, sex is very rarely necessary to the telling of it. Writing sex, more often than not, is just about having fun.

This is a good thing. Writing is fun. Writing is about playing with words, worlds, characters and stories. If you find yourself too wound up about Writing Correctly, then throwing all that away purely to write something indulgently unnecessary can be a good way to teach yourself that it’s okay to let loose. If you’re not writing to please an outside audience, then you’re only writing to please yourself. It’s a lot easier to write for the pleasure of it when you’re already accustomed to writing for your own sake.

And yes, obviously, there are stories where the sex is the point. There are stories where important things happen during the sex, because of the sex. All these are fine, and my point is that they’re far easier to write when you’re having fun with them instead of stressing about anyone else’s reaction. It’s an unfortunate state of writerdom these days that writers need to train themselves into being allowed to have fun.

The moment you approach writing from the perspective of ‘I’m going to show this to someone’ is the moment you open the door to start worrying about their opinion. When you’re writing porn, that goes double.

So don’t go there. If you’re seeking to unlearn the fear of writing and striving to learn the enjoyment of it, start from a place of writing only for you. It might be that you decide to show someone after the fact, and that’s fine! But begin by writing for you.

Since a lot of people are reticent about showing porn to anyone else anyway, it makes for a good subject to start engaging with writing for yourself, and in terms of what you like in your writing. Sex is an absurdity. It can be messy, funny, noisy and kind of gross, which means you can have a lot of fun making up weird situations that you don’t have to be afraid of anyone else witnessing (and often wind up making the actual porn better, once you get a handle on it — for reasons I’ll be illustrating in a later topic). Writing porn you don’t intend to show anyone often gives you permission to play around and be foolish in ways that can be harder to do with other subjects.

When you’re confident in writing indulgently, just for the hell of it and just for the sake of being delighted in your own words, you can bring that same attitude to other things you write; and in doing so, you make your stories more compelling.

On deconstructing shame (by writing porn)

This is the first in series of blog posts about writing sex. (NSFW, obviously.)

To start with, I strongly believe that all writers benefit from writing porn. There’s a few reasons for this and I’ll be covering each of those in different blog posts. In this post, I’m talking about why it’s a writer’s responsibility to be comfortable with certain kinds of words.

A couple of notes: No, this doesn’t mean I believe there should be porn in all stories, that the porn needs to be shown to other people to ‘count’, or that sex is more important than any other subject matter. (I also don’t believe anyone with traumatic associations to words or acts should be forced or feel obligated to use them: there’s degrees of comfort available here, not a blanket prescription.)

Writing porn in fiction teaches a writer about a wealth of different things, and those are what I’ll be covering.

I believe writing sex makes for better writers not because it’s A Necessary Benchmark To Be A Writer(TM) but because writing sex teaches writers a lot about their craft. (I hesitate to say ‘practice writing sex’ because all writing is, in one form or another, practice, and using the phrase gives the illusion of writing to get to a certain place, instead of writing for its own sake.)

We as a society have so much shame, control and gatekeeping surrounding the subject of sex, sexual topics, and sex-related organs. It’s simultaneously touted as majorly important to a (usually cis male) healthy life, and vilified as something shameful and worth of pearl-clutching (usually in relation to … everyone else).

There’s a lot of reasons to write about sex in general, for one’s own sake and to gain an understanding of one’s own health, body and physicality. What I’m talking about here is specifically the act of writing sexual acts, in fiction, between two people. As said, there’s a few reasons, but the first and arguably most important one is this:

Writing sex demystifies sex.

Who here was the kid who giggled in sex-ed class because ‘penis’ was a no-no word? (Who here was the kid who didn’t get a sex-ed class, who didn’t know how it worked and was too afraid to ask?) Who still giggles nervously when someone says ‘vagina’ out loud? Laughter is often — not always, but often — an instinctive tool to assuage embarrassment, shame or discomfort. The fact that we as a society feel any of those things in relation to sex tells us that sex is a taboo topic, and for a writer, that’s bad.

Writers are wordsmiths. We deal in words. If there are words that make us feel embarrassed, ashamed or uncomfortable just for existing to describe organs and acts that are perfectly normal, then it’s to our benefit to become comfortable with those words. If we don’t, then we aren’t capable of using them in a way which is honest, insightful, respectful, consensual or all of the above. When we let our emotions control the use of words which describe things which are normal and natural, then we aren’t in control of our writing. And that gets in the way of refining our craft.

Penis. Testicles. Urethra. Nipple. Breast. Vagina. Clitoris. Vulva.

These are just words. Some of them still carry a burden of socially-ingrained discomfort for me, mostly because the porn I write is predominantly gay, so I don’t have a huge range of exposure to some of them. When I first started using ‘penis’ and ‘testicles’ in porn, it felt cringe-worthy. Too clinical, too — too. Too everything. Too uncomfortable. Too giggle-worthy.

Now they’re just words. They describe body parts that are applicable in the scene: they let me get to the point instead of trying to sidle around what I want to actually say. Do I try to insert them everywhere, just because I know and am comfortable using them? No, of course not. But they’re tools in my toolbox I’m unafraid to use if a story calls for them.

Sex isn’t the only subject which comes with this kind of emotional baggage: but it’s by far and away the one which carries the most of them. Writing about sex isn’t just writing about the physical act of intercourse. It’s writing about men’s intimacy, women’s pleasure; it’s writing about gay and lesbian and non-binary sexualities; it’s writing about people with trans* and non-binary relationships to their organs and the intersection with their sexual needs. It’s writing about the act of not having sex, by choice, by consent, by lack of need or inclination … about the logistics of physically disabled people having the sex they’re often otherwise denied.

Sex as a topic isn’t only about sex. Demystifying sex-related words enables a writer to talk about them with full awareness of what they’re saying, without fear of the words themselves: and once the fear is gone, it’s easier to apply them to characters and situations we might not have considered beforehand.

Whether the demystification is for the writer’s own sake, to enable them to face other fears, or for the sake of readers who lack exposure to those words, doesn’t matter; a smith who’s afraid of their tools is incapable of using them correctly, and incapable of the active choice not to.

On the weariness of waiting

I realised today that we’re three months into the year and I’m still waiting for it to begin.
Because of the way I left last year — incomeless — it feels like the recovery’s never actually begun. I went into the pandemic in a good spot, and through most of the year I was in that good spot; but because of the pandemic it’s been that much harder to get a paying job after my personal gap year than I anticipated.

So, there’s been a part of me that’s still waiting for me to have a solid income before I get moving on anything else.

To a degree, that’s legitimate. There’s a lot of things in 2020 I had to recover from, whether or not I was in a good place or a bad place to cope with things as they happened. It’s just that now I’m realising that I’m tired of waiting.

This is, believe it or not, a good thing. It indicates I’m feeling emotionally and mentally resilient enough to start looking at things I’d put down, despite the fact that my financial situation really hasn’t changed. I still don’t know how I’m going to manage the year; I still can’t see to its end. Or even its middle. But I feel less immobilised about not knowing, if for no other reason than spite.

Well, spite and some measure of recuperation.

I’ve been writing again, in drips and drabs. Nothing formal, nothing habit-forming; but enough that I’ve done it more than once, for no other reason than to write. Relearning passion after having spent a year afraid to commit lest danger come knocking is a worthy intent.

Over time I’ll start adding more things to my list. It’ll be slow, probably, taking things one day or one week at a time. But sooner or later something will give enough that I can start to see further ahead. I’m holding out for that day.

On energy types and queuestacking

I’ve been reading a few things about energy management lately. I occasionally do, but I see less discourse about it than I do about time management in relation to productivity. For me the thing that always gets in my way is energy management rather than time.

It’s been helpful, mostly in terms of IDing which energy I’m lacking (out of phyiscal, mental, emotional, spiritual). When I’m tired it usually translates as physical so I don’t wind up doing anything. IDing the energy I’m lacking has, in these early days, been a bit more of a prompt to do something else (ie, after an intensive mentally-draining gaming session with friends, I go for a walk to clear my head. Mental exhaustion was solved by letting my brain rest with music and movement.)

There isn’t really a problem with this per se, except for noticing things I haven’t previously. Like how much of the energy I expend is mental in nature.

For instance, in job searching. As it turns out, having job search (and lack of progress) ties up all my mental energy for anything. Writing is hard, because it’s in the queue behind ‘get an income’. Certain high-intensity hobbies are impossible to think about because they’re in the queuestack behind ‘get an income’. Blogs get delayed because they’re stuck in the queue behind … you get the idea.

The financial stress ties up the whole queue and makes it hard to even remotely see the bottom. Escapism is the only mental energy I can find aside from that particular queue, probably because I’m loopholing in through the emotional intake.

Like I said, not really a problem, to know the queuestack is there. It’s something of a relief to know that there are some things which will by definition become easier once that queue has been emptied a little.

But knowing that it’s full and why is still making for some terrible days when I feel overwhelmed by things I can’t control, so much that I have trouble enacting things that I can.

Things are hard right now and I still can’t see past the end of March. Given we’re in March, that unseeable time is looming fast.

But at least I do know a little but more about my energy types. And I have enough experience to know that by the time I come out the other side of this, whatever happens, I’ll have learned something out of it. It’s just being on this side that sucks the most.

On how writing changes the writer

One of my favourite quotes is ‘Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.’ by GK Chesterton. It’s been brought out often enough, at least in my circles, that it seems cliche to like it, but it’s true.

The thing about this quote, though, is that someone had to write the fairy tales to begin with. Someone had to tell the stories. Someone had to create them. Why did they tell those stories? What were they seeking to learn from them?

Most of the interactions I see talked about are interactions between readers and stories (especially on the subject of deconstruction … that’s another topic). What I don’t see a whole lot is how much writing something can change the writer.

We know, psychologically, that writing things down has an observable and definitive impact; but for some reason I don’t see writers realising that that goes for fiction as well. The whole absurdity of ‘writing what you know’ being interpreted as ‘write only what is in your immediate experience’ is absurd for exactly that reason: a giant part of the reason to write is to learn. The best way to discover things you never knew about until you had to start writing them is to … start writing them.

For me, writing has always been a means to learn. Not just about myself — though that happens to — but the things I’m writing about. I set out to write things I don’t know anything about, because I need to research them in order to write them with respect and understanding. I don’t always get things right, but doing so opens me up to information and experiences I wouldn’t otherwise have, and that serves to push the capabilities of my imagination further. (Somehow, I keep coming back to writing about civil waste infrastructure … I’m going to wind up self-studying architecture or civil engineering one day, just wait.)

In fan parlance it’s pretty common to talk about ‘having a type’. The thing is that your types will tell you more about yourself than almost anything else. The characters you resonate with, the characters you write, are reflections of you and the person you want to be. My type can be neatly summed by, and with variations on, the phrase ‘a dutiful man of faith grappling with faith and possessing of phenomenal cosmic power he consciously chooses to gentle’. (I was raised by a single father who was a minister of religion and who was consciously and persistently contrary to the religious conventions he preached, in favour of gentleness and compassion.)

So, what do I tend to write about? Knights. Priests. Men of duty, losing faith and regaining it. The faith doesn’t necessarily need to be religious (though it frequently is, and not only in the Christian sense). Redemption, very often. Deconstructions of modern toxic masculinity are definitely in there, and I can trace that back to my upbringing. Grace. Compassion. Forgiveness.

I write about these things because as I write about them, I learn more about them too. The more I learn about them, the more I can change my future paths to aligning toward those values.

When I write about dragons, it isn’t to say they exist, or they can be killed. I already know that. It’s to remind myself that, sometimes, they can also be saved.

On using understandable language

This morning one of the mailing lists to which I’m subscribed linked me to this article about how jargon relates to trust by Shane Snow. I like a lot of what Snow has to say (it’s his mailing list), and he generally makes me think. What he had to say on this occasion isn’t new to me, but it’s important, and might be new to some of you.

Snow usually writes from a business perspective, so bear that in mind; but he has good points to make about the use of clear language. Language at its foundation is a communication tool. When language becomes verbose, it stops being a way to communicate our ideas and starts being a way to measure status.

One of the hallmarks of an inexperience writer is a tendency to use more complicated words than strictly necessary to get our point across. This isn’t a bad thing, for the record — expanding vocabulary is important, and there are vital stages of writing through which we all have to pass in order to learn. (I definitely went through this stage. I think every writer does.) Purple prose is an inexperienced writer flexing: and that’s fine, because all writers need a stage where they learn they can flex.

But don’t mistake the point of that: that stage in a writer’s lifetime isn’t about communicating to readers, even though writers invariably think it is. It’s about communicating with oneself, using readers as a proxy. When I think back on that stage in my own writing development, I remember more so the feeling of playing around with language to say what I really want. Was it always good? No. But the play helped me figure out how to make it better.

Anyone who wants to communicate clearly with their readers had better know how to write in a way which is accessible to those readers. (I’m speaking specifically here of word-use, as opposed to accessibility relating to disabilities, which is a separate topic.)

A caveat: writing in an accessible way doesn’t make big words bad. Note the title of this blog is ‘understandable language’, not ‘plain language’. That’s because big words don’t equal hard topics and small ones don’t equal simple ones, but using the phrase ‘plain language’ sometimes gives the impression that only small words ought to be used. Big words often are alone in their meaning or have specific and applicable connotations. If it’s the word you need, use it.

I make this distinction specifically because big words sometimes get short thrift. Someone who has a wide vocabulary might use a specific word which means exactly what they want, and that doesn’t make the choice a bad one. I tend to believe there’s some meeting in the middle required between writer and audience.

Usually, when text is dense it’s not just because of the words being used, it’s because the point is being avoided. Reading the examples Snow uses in his article, the examples of poor language he presents aren’t just about the words. Hell, in one of his examples the words are as simple as you could want. The problem isn’t the words. It’s that they’re avoiding the point.

Understandable language isn’t just about word-use. Words are important, and if you know your audience you might choose one synonym over another (ie, if you’re writing for a younger audience who won’t have the vocabulary of an older one). But more important is whether you’re willing to commit to what you’re saying. The things that resonate with us the most (or strike us the hardest) tend to be phrases and sentences which cut to the quick, which say the quiet things out loud. That can’t happen when what you want to say has too many trappings.

This goes for anything you write. It goes for fiction. The difference is that in fiction you might want to make your audience think one thing as a red herring, when the truth is another. That’s why the purple-prosey stage of writing is important: you learn how to obfuscate, and then how to not. You learn how to say what you mean without actually saying it, which gives you narrative wiggle room. And then, when all bets are off and you can say what you mean loud and clear, it becomes all the more impactful for it. But that might be a topic for another blog post.

If you want your readers to understand you clearly, don’t just focus on the words you use. Focus on how you use them. If you find your language avoids committing to what you want to say, find ways to cut the crap until you’ve landed on what you actually want to communicate.

On promises and failing out

I think promises are important. I think also that we place too much weight on them as a shorthand. ‘Promise’ is a really big word, but like the word ‘literally’ it has come to be used more as emphasis than intent (and in my opinion with more damaging results). The speaker wants to exhibit passion: the listener hears commitment. Whether the promise is made to self or to someone else, every time it’s witnessed being broken, you do a little damage to your reputation; and promises can be made without ever actually saying the word ‘promise’.

Personally, I reserve promises for times when I want the promise itself to motivate me. Promises become conflicts when they’re made out of obligation, in competition with someone’s actual desire. I try not to promise anything to which I know I can’t guarantee commitment (or which I have not yet assessed as being able to guarantee commitment: there’s a difference between promising something I genuinely think I can do, and promising something I actually haven’t considered yet).

And sometimes, despite all good intentions and all best efforts, promises do get broken, because people are flawed and sometimes shit just happens.

This is all relevant because I had to break a promise this month. I made it a year ago, in perfectly good faith, before the pandemic. The pandemic made me incapable of fulfilling that promise. And it sucks. It sucks because there is always that part of me that thinks ‘if you just tried a little harder you could have done it’.

The thing is, sometimes that’s not true. It might feel true, but that doesn’t mean it is true, and feeling like that is a matter of shame, which is an emotion weaponised only to make us feel bad.

I dislike breaking promises. I place enough value on them not to make them lightly, or try not to. But promises can also be chains and cudgels, and I try not to do that to myself either. What I did do was acknowledge the things that wouldn’t be done — not as early as I wanted, but early enough to assuage the betrayal, I hope — and then I let myself off the hook.

Next time I’ll try to do better. What ‘better’ looks like will change based on the nature of the promise, how far ahead it’s made. Estimates may be wiser; a shorter time-frame may be more inspiring. A promise is an opportunity to discover your limits.

Promises are important: but only if they’re valued as something to galvanise, not to threaten; as inspiration, not as shame. Think about the promises you make, and whether you’re capable of meeting them: and if made in good faith, but turn out to be impossible, forgive yourself for being human, and remember the lesson for next time.

On habits and friction

The best book on habits I’ve ever read is ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear. I recommend it mostly because in every other book I’ve seen potentially helpful suggestions, but no real overarching framework. Clear breaks mentality and psychology down into something useable and customisable, without judgement.

I’m due for a reread, but one of the things that stuck with me since I read it last is the concept of what my friends and I call friction, and its partner inertia.

I usually solve inertia with ‘habit chains’: that is, bundling different activities together so that I can move from one to the next without much new activation energy. Clear talks about this too, but in different terms.

Lately habit chains haven’t been working so well because my chains, when not minded well, can start running long until I feel pressed for time and overwhelmed. A few different things have made it so habit chains which were an okay length are now too long, and cutting them short nerfs their usefulness for particular tasks, requiring me to either chain them onto another habit (which is still a chain) or find a different cue.

And we come to my writing chair and writing in it. I’m not, currently, in a position where I’m expecting to write — but ‘showing up’ is an important habit-formation technique too. The problem was that I just didn’t want to sit in my chair, even when I wasn’t doing anything but sitting in it anyway. I know the reasons why, and came to the conclusion that that habit wasn’t serving me currently, but the writing chair is usually where I go to Get Things Done, and if I don’t have a place to do that — well, I’m fighting myself there.

Enter friction. Activation energy is friction, and where before my writing chair habit was chained to something else, that made the chain too long for the mental place I am now.

Friction is an asshole, because it makes things seem harder than they are, even if they’re easy. It’s also, as Clear describes, a tool, because you can reduce friction in something you’re resistant to doing while inducing friction in something you do without thinking. (Not necessarily something you want to do — if you’re scrolling tumblr but don’t actually want to be, you’ve been absconded by a habit, not making a choice. Habits work against us too.)

For me, reducing and inducing friction on my laptop means making use of passwords and alternate laptop accounts. I have a main account and a writing account on my laptop; the writing account gives me internet access (for research) and writing programs (for obvious) but has nothing else, and nothing except my writing folders synced so I can’t access my cloud distractions. The problem is that unless I’m in my writing chair, I don’t tend to use it.

Enter judicious use of friction. Windows login these days has a PIN option. My main account had a PIN and my writing account didn’t. I’ve now switched those so my main account takes longer to sign into and my writing account is easier. I’ve also changed up my screen saver settings so I get bumped to the login screen every time it comes on, which means that every time, I get a choice as to which account to use.

Has it worked so far? Nebulously. Habits take time to institute. I may have made a mistake making the PIN to my writing account a new one. I think I’ll make that PIN the same one I was using on my main account, because that already has muscle memory attached to it. And as an environment, my writing account does feel like I’m ‘settling’ for something temporary instead of ‘making myself comfortable’, so I think I need to put more effort into curating the space to make it welcoming, instead of a grudging stop-off on my way to comfy cyberspace.

But the use of my writing account now feels like more of an option than it did before, no matter where I’m sitting, where previously I felt limited to the physical chair. So, I’ll continue to tweak, to make my writing account frictionless and my main account a little more friction-full, and see how I go.

Either way, very often just moving the friction around can open something up that wasn’t visible before, and it’s something I try to employ when I can.

On laws of narrative satisfaction

In the last few weeks or so I’ve mentioned what kinds of endings and what kinds of hopeful stories I like. I’ve come to the conclusion that there are three elements which create, for me, a fully satisfying story: they inform each other, and if just one of them fails, then the story fails to satisfy me also.

Hopefully having some of these words will help some of you figure out your tastes. These needs also define the kinds of stories I write and why. Let’s call them Pur’s Laws of Narrative Satisfaction.

1: The given universe cannot itself be villainous: it cannot be unjust or weighted toward cruelty or negativity for no reason.
2: Any values that apply to the protagonist must also be applied to any other person in the universe.
3: If the ineffectiveness of the status quo is a plot point, the narrative must be willing to break it.

Laws 1 and 2 are the ones that will make or break a story for me. Law 3 is a breaker because when it applies, and when it fails, it by its nature breaks Laws 1 and 2.

The stories of hope I want and need are predicated on the notion that the universe isn’t slanted toward grinding individuals beneath its heel. So, if a story is predicated on the idea that the inherent mechanics of the given cosmos are provably unjust or negative, I’m out. That’s why the question of the universe being the villain is important.

And if a narrative is at all hypocritical, if the story only mattered for the protagonist and not everyone else, then by nature the universe is unjust. Breaking the second law inherently breaks the first: if the endings you give to characters are slanted based on protagonist or not protagonist, you’ve lost me.

The third law is somewhat more specific, and I haven’t yet talked about it. Not all stories threaten the status quo: these stories are exempt from this narrative engagement. As long as they hit the first two points, they’d satisfy me. Navigating within the constraints of a given universe is fine, as long as the story itself doesn’t introduce a villain or some other narrative function which tests those constraints.

Of course, stories of worlds ending and great evils are pretty much the most common ones in the genres I read the most.

My problem is this: if you’re writing an urban fantasy or some other real-world analogue, the status quo is not perfect. For many, many people it is a torture. If a story has a villain that threatens the status quo and its protagonists seek to preserve it, without examining whether it ought to be changed, I’m gonna be judging it. And if a story promises some kind of massive change or magical revelation and then backs away from it, I’m gonna be judging it hardcore.

I’ve only once found an urban fantasy that was willing to upheave the world as we knew it due to the discovery of magic in some fashion or another. It was a side-effect of the hero’s choice, it was a juicy characterisation, and I loved it; but the story wasn’t about that reveal, so it happened at the very end and without much in the way of examination.

I have read numerous urban fantasies which dance around the edges of taking that plunge, and disappointingly back away from it. In some cases, the narrative got so far that the reveal seemed like it ought to be inevitable before changing its mind. This is worst kind of tease: a promise with no pay off.

The problem with using ‘will people find out about magic’ as a narrative stake is that it assumes that people finding out is inherently bad. That has terrible implications in terms of casting knowledge and making considered choices as evil. It also valorises the status quo as somehow better and preferable to any other options.

It hides the fact that people in our current world are poor, homeless, hated, tortured, ignored.

When a narrative threatens the status quo without being willing to acknowledge that maybe some people would benefit from the breaking of it, that narrative breaks both rules 1 and 2: it means that some of the people who exist in that universe don’t get the same dispensation as the protagonists, and it means therefore that the universe itself is built unjustly.

Is it possible to use that stake well, and still come to the conclusion that the status quo is better? Yes! Of course! There are some world-ending things which are so literally world-ending that staying alive is better than everything dying. These aren’t the instances I’m talking about. And it’s possible to examine the stakes and come to the conclusion that the worldwide conflict that might arise would cause more suffering.

But that’s the point: narratives which use the reveal as a stake rarely if ever contemplate this. That’s why the rule states that the narrative must be willing to break the status quo. A narrative that’s willing to do so by definition will examine the subject thoroughly, and come to a considered conclusion.

Most narratives aren’t willing: they just pretend to be, to varying degrees, without actually committing.

And yes, I do judge them hardcore.

I have a lot of trouble finding stories which meet these three laws, and I’ve been disappointed a lot. (It didn’t help that in the past I had no real words to articulate why otherwise well-written stories were failing the satisfaction test.) But now I can say, with certainty:

These are the stories I’d read, so these are the stories I write.