Blog

How to Spot Fake Beta Reader Applications

Every beta reader application gave the same answer On Wednesday I posted a reel that asked, "Is this thing on?" I'd spent 2 weeks recruiting 12 beta readers for Technomancer: The Awakened Mage, and the application form had been quiet. By the deadline, applications had come in. I …

The Worldbuilding Template: Sketch a World in 10 Minutes, Then Dig

Worldbuilding is where a lot of us either freeze or drown. We freeze because a blank "describe your world" page gives us nowhere to start. We drown because once we do start, there's no bottom, and you can spend a year on tax law for a country that never appears on the page. The S…

The Studio, 2 months later

In July I opened the Studio at charlieforet.com/studio and introduced it with a promise of one post per tool. The Character Template came next. Then the series stopped. Or it might have looked that way. Since then I've written the Workshop posts, on how and why I built my own pla…

The Hero's Journey as Scaffolding

The hero's journey is scaffolding you build with, then take down The hero's journey is a circle with seventeen stations on it. Ordinary world at the top, then the call, the refusal, the mentor, the threshold, all the way around. You've seen the diagram. I've leaned on that circle…

The New Character Template

The Character Template: Build a Character You Can Come Back To Every writer has a graveyard of half-finished character sheets. Mine used to live in Word documents named things like char_notes_FINAL_v3.docx. The template was fine. The problem was everything around it: no consisten…

Introducing the Studio

Craft Tools Accessible from Anywhere Most of the tools we lean on as writers live somewhere else. The character sheet is a Word doc in a folder we forget the name of. The worldbuilding notes are scattered across three apps. The "read it out loud and catch the lumps" pass happens …

The Writing Resources Page

I keep my working craft notes on one page of this site. It's called Writing Resources, and reaching it costs nothing but a free account. I mean the actual notes. The template I fill in before I name a character. The ten-part slog I went through to build a believable world for my …

The Chapter You Can't Write

The Chapter You Can't Write Every craft podcast tells you to push through. On this, every craft podcast is wrong. Or to be fair: right about half the time, badly wrong the other half. And nobody teaches you which half you're in. Most working writers have lived the bad version. A …

Writing YA Fiction

Imagine your whole school can see your stats A sixteen-year-old, one humiliating half second, and the reckless thing he does to prove it wasn’t the whole story. You already know where you rank. Somebody decided years ago, the label stuck, and most days it feels settled. The athle…

OODA Loops by Example

Last time, I argued that revision is an OODA loop, and that the step most writers skip is Orient — the move where you frame what you’ve read against what the passage is actually for, before you change a single word. That’s easy to assert and harder to show. So this dispatch is on…

OODA Loops for Editing

When you’re stuck in rewrite hell — version after version, none of them actually better — the problem usually isn’t your writing skill. It’s something quieter that most writers never name. Most revisions fight themselves. Here’s why. Every working writer has felt the difference b…

In Defense of the Adverb

The adverb prohibition was never a rule. It was a Strunk & White nervous tic that became orthodoxy — and our prose got worse for it. The prohibition isn’t entirely wrong. There’s a real craft problem buried inside it, and the rule was an attempt to solve it. But somewhere between…