Introducing, A Field Guide to Narrative Craft

Ten Principles for Writing with Depth, Precision, and Resonance

I read a lot of books.

But I will confess: I don’t finish most of them.

Partially, my tendency to abandon books midway has a lot to do with my attention span issues and unfettered optimism about how much I can actually do in a day, but what usually kicks me out of a novel is pretty simple: flat characters I don’t care about, endless exposition, flabby plotting, no sense of mystery or curiosity. And, of course, awful prose. I can’t get past lazy, self-indulgent writing (J.K. Rowling’s success notwithstanding). A sentence should do more than fill space. It should earn its place.

That’s what this series is about: writing that earns its place.

This series is a field guide—not a map, not a manual. A field guide doesn’t tell you where to go or what to build–it trains your attention and teaches you what to notice. And more importantly, it gives you a language for what you already intuit but haven’t quite named.

When I was young, one of my most treasured possessions was the Audubon Society Field Guide to Insects and Spiders. I carried it in my backpack while I explored the woods, fields, and creeks surrounding my childhood home in rural Michigan, flipping through its glossy pages to identify dragonflies, beetles, and butterflies. Back home, I carefully pinned and labeled specimens, trying not just to collect them, but to understand them—how they were built, how they behaved, how they fit into the world. I was fascinated by how each insect seemed perfectly adapted for its purpose: the precise viciousness of the praying mantis, the impossibly iridescent armor of the tiger beetle, the collective intelligence of an ant colony. Even then, I was drawn to form, function, and the quiet logic of systems. I didn’t yet have the language of form and function, but I felt it. And in retrospect, I think I was already learning how to observe with care and precision—skills just as crucial to writing as they are to science.

That memory lingers. And it’s what inspired the framing of this series as a field guide.

A favorite: Pachydiplax longipennis. Photo credit: cirrusimage.com

I’m aware that the term already has its place in writing pedagogy—there’s The Norton Field Guide to Writing, Robin Hemley’s A Field Guide for Immersion Writing, and others. Those are useful, structured texts. This series isn’t quite that.

My series is a field guide in the older, more analog sense: a tool for sharpening attention, a guide for the curious, and a set of principles gathered from long observation. My aim isn’t to give rules but to name patterns—to help writers of all kinds notice how narrative works and where it can go wrong.

So yes, this is a field guide. But it’s also a kind of cabinet of curiosities. What you do with it is up to you.

One of the easiest ways to get published, my nonfiction writing professor once told us, is to write a book about how to get published. (Other surefire ways, she noted, were to write a cookbook or anything about Abraham Lincoln.) And, I admit that it’s something of a cliché, of course—a writer writing about writing. There are plenty of books out there by famous authors sharing their thoughts on the craft. You can learn a tremendous amount from books like Stephen King’s On Writing, Roy Peter Clark’s Writing Tools, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Each offers a particular lens—part memoir, part instruction, part ethos.

So, take what I offer here with a grain of salt.

But I do think I’m coming at this from a slightly unusual angle. I write in multiple genres. I build novels. I teach academic writing and personal essays. I direct students as they construct intellectual memoirs and explain complex research projects. I also study literature, culture, and history—and, more importantly, the underlying technology of narrative from a rhetorical standpoint. I care about how stories work, not just what they say. And I read omnivorously, without allegiance to any particular genre or tradition. I find as much satisfaction in a well-written book about fly fishing as I do anything by Joyce.

A metaphor. Photo credit: Bill Chizek on stock.adobe.com

This guide isn’t about writing like me, because you should write like you, and I have a fair bit of bad habits and syntactic tics that could get you in trouble. This guide is about noticing more, caring more, and writing with greater purpose—whatever your form.

Each entry in this guide explores a principle I believe is essential to writing stories that matter. Not formulae, not commandments—but generative constraints, drawn from literary theory, classical rhetoric, screenwriting craft, and lived experience. Some principles are structural. Others are ethical. All are meant to be lived with, tested, and rewritten.

Here are the ten principles:

1. Every Element Serves Two Masters
   Narrative compression. Multivalence. Design with density.
   

2. Mystery is a Function of Memory
   Unreliability. Trauma. Narrative gaps as psychological truth.
   

3. Restraint Builds Power
   Negative capability. Suspense. What you don’t say matters more.
   

4. Use Character as Contrast
   Foils, dyads, dialectics. We understand through difference.
   

5. Make Consequences Unavoidable
   Moral realism. Chain reaction plotting. No unearned events.
   

6. Layer Time and History
   Nonlinearity. Memory and myth. Temporality as texture.
   

7. Let Setting Speak
   Place as metaphor. Atmosphere as subtext.
   

8. Ideology is More Dangerous than Evil
   Belief systems. Banality. Complexity over caricature.
   

9. Redemption is a Process, Not a Twist
   Arc as ethical change. Earned transformation.
   

10. There is Always a Larger Force
    Institutions, systems, myth. No character acts alone.
    

You don’t need to agree with all ten. In fact, I hope you don’t. But I hope they challenge you to think more deeply about what your writing is doing—and why.

So, I will be irregularly publishing an entry in the field guide – usually between multi-part arcs like A Love Supreme and others to follow - partially to break up the rhythm, partially to ensure that each principle has enough time to breathe before we move on to the next one.

Thanks for reading.