by Derek Murphy | Apr 26, 2025 | Craft
Before stories lived on paper, they had to live in the mind. For thousands of years, before printing presses and digital archives, stories weren’t something you read—they were something you remembered. Bards, poets, and oral storytellers carried entire epics in their...
by Derek Murphy | Apr 26, 2025 | Craft
There’s a moment before you open an old manuscript—before you scroll through the draft you haven’t touched in months—when the book exists in a perfect quantum state. It could be brilliant. It could be terrible. It could be both. This is Schrödinger’s Draft, the...
by Derek Murphy | Apr 26, 2025 | Craft
Some writers don’t just hear words. They see them. For them, a sentence isn’t just a string of letters—it’s a texture, a color, a weight. Some names feel jagged, others smooth. Some words taste like metal, others like burnt sugar. This is synesthesia, a neurological...
by Derek Murphy | Apr 26, 2025 | Craft
Some writers can’t stop writing. Not in the motivated, productive sense—where inspiration strikes and the words pour out effortlessly. This is something different. This is a compulsion, an almost physical need to put words down, to keep going even when there’s nothing...
by Derek Murphy | Apr 26, 2025 | Craft
Some stories just work. The beats fall into place, the structure feels inevitable, and the ending lands exactly where it should. It’s easy to assume this is instinct—some unconscious talent that lets writers intuitively shape a compelling narrative. But what if it’s...
by Derek Murphy | Apr 26, 2025 | Craft
Some ideas don’t feel like ideas. They don’t arrive politely, waiting to be developed at a reasonable pace. They invade. They plant themselves in your mind and refuse to leave, hijacking your thoughts, demanding your time. You’re trying to focus on something...
