Blog
Updates and behind-the-scenes notes from Charlie Forêt.
Filter by tag : Writing Process
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…
The Quiet Apocalypse
Welcome to “An Author’s Voice” where I’ll discuss the craft behind writing and illustrate the points with my own work or discuss other well known examples. Episode Three : The Quiet Apocalypse This post accompanies Episode 3 of An Author’s Voice. If you haven’t listened yet, the …
The 14-Chapter Silence: Writing Trauma Without Putting It on the Page
Content Warning: This post discusses the craft of writing sexual assault aftermath in fiction. Here is a scene I chose not to write. It would have been the scene where everything that shapes Elara’s subsequent behavior in Technomancer actually happened — the event that explains h…
Six Voices, Zero Tags: Why Character Voice is Constraints, Not Personality
There’s a test I run on every POV chapter in Technomancer: strip the chapter heading and ask whether the reader can still tell who’s talking. If the answer is no — if the voice could belong to any of the six point-of-view characters — the chapter isn’t ready. Not because the pros…
The Dirty Secret of First Person
Welcome to “An Author’s Voice” where I’ll discuss the craft behind writing and illustrate the points with my own work or discuss other well known examples. Episode Two : The Dirty Secret of First Person: Your Narrator Is Lying You know that feeling — three chapters into a novel, …