Writing Tips
Share your best writing tips, techniques, and resources for better storytelling.
Tips for Ai writing.
Hi, i want to know how you guys are using ai in your stories. Thanks!
Collaborative writing on Sproker: how do I set up a chapter so the next writer can succeed?
I've been thinking about this a lot since I started contributing here. When you write for a traditional novel, you know what's coming. On Sproker, the next chapter is being written by someone who has read yours but doesn't know your plans. So: how do you write a chapter that gives the next writer a good launch point without constraining them? Things I've found that help: **End on motion, not resolution.** A character walking toward something, making a decision, receiving information. Not: "and then she understood everything." Yes: "she picked up the phone." **Plant three options.** Introduce a detail, a relationship, and an unresolved tension. The next writer can pick any one of these as their thread. If you plant only one thing, you're railroading. Three feels like a world. **Be specific about the wrong things.** The room doesn't need a specific wall colour, but the smell matters. The character's hair colour doesn't matter, but their way of speaking under stress does. Specific sensory and behavioural details are generative. Specific visual details are constraints. **Don't solve your own mystery.** If you introduce a suspicious character, do not immediately reveal whether they're suspicious for a reason. Let the next writer decide. Anything I'm missing?
The "one more thing" technique for chapter endings
The best chapter endings I know all do the same thing: they resolve the immediate question and then, in the last sentence or two, introduce something new. Not a cliffhanger exactly - a new pressure. A detail that recontextualises what just happened. I call it the "one more thing" ending because it works like a detective saying "just one more thing" on the way out the door. The scene is over. Then it isn't. Examples from my own work: end a chapter with a character finally deciding to leave a toxic relationship, and then have them find a note that makes them reconsider. The leaving is resolved. The note is the new thing. You haven't cliffhangered - you've just moved the weight. The trap is overusing it. If every chapter ends with a new thing, readers stop feeling the new thing. Use it at structural moments: act breaks, relationship shifts, information reveals. Anyone else have reliable techniques for endings that don't feel cheap?
On writing characters who are smarter than you are
This comes up a lot in workshops and I want to give it a serious answer because the usual advice ("just fake it") is not helpful. When you write a genius character - a chess grandmaster, a quantum physicist, a criminal mastermind - you are not writing their intelligence. You are writing its effects. The genius sees the board differently. You don't need to understand every move; you need to understand that everyone else is three moves behind and show us that gap. Practical techniques: 1. Research the domain enough to know what the questions are, not necessarily the answers. Your genius character asks better questions than other people. 2. Let the genius be wrong about things outside their domain. Sherlock Holmes is rubbish at normal human interaction. This isn't a weakness in the character - it's what makes the intelligence feel real. 3. Write the other characters's reactions to the genius. We understand that someone is exceptional by watching others fail to keep up. 4. The genius should have a blindspot the reader can see but the character cannot. This is where your story actually lives. What domains have people found hardest to write intelligence in?