A note: thread means plot line. Alternatively: Narrative thread, Story line.

Before you start reading: All the information I provide comes from one or more sources. I do not invent anything. Creative writing has existed for centuries, so I am simply here to share it in my own way and make it easier to understand. If I do not mention a source or resource, and you want to know where the information comes from, just ask before assuming. I am a ghostwriter and copywriter, which means I write for people in business, including educational content and YouTube channels. Whatever the topic, feel free to ask. I am here to clarify any doubts in a friendly way.

A novel needs pressure from more than one direction. Not chaos. Not clutter. Pressure.

One of the quickest ways to weaken a story is to give it too little to carry. Another is to give it far too much.

In both cases, the reader feels the strain.

In one version, the novel seems thin, repetitive, and cut off from the texture of real life. In the other, it becomes crowded, diffuse, and hard to follow. Good plotting lies between those extremes.

A useful way to think about this is thread count.

Every novel has a natural number of active threads: the right number of characters, the right number of tensions, the right number of developments. That number will change from one book to another, but the principle does not. A plot should feel rich enough to sustain movement, yet clear enough to remain legible.

The first danger is what we might call plot monogamy.

This happens when a novel gives the readers only one line of action and asks them to do all the work.

Example: Two characters meet. Then they talk about the meeting. Then they think about meeting. Then they quarrel, reconcile, kiss, separate, reunite, and all of it happens in a world that barely seems to exist beyond the pair. The novel may be full of emotion, but the structure is starved.

The problem is not romance, intimacy, or focus.

The problem is isolation.

Real life does not pause because one relationship matters.

Example: A woman who is obsessed with a man still has a job, a family, a body, habits, debts, obligations, distractions, and private fears. A protagonist cannot feel fully alive if everyone else in the novel exists only to discuss the central relationship. When friends and relatives appear only to ask, “So what happened with him?” the world shrinks, and the story shrinks with it.

An even more extreme version is the one-character drift: page after page of a protagonist thinking, remembering, brooding, regretting, or observing, without meaningful interaction and without real pressure from outside the self. That sort of novel often mistakes introspection for movement. It may be sincere. It may even be intelligent. But sincerity is not plot, and intelligence is not momentum.

A single consciousness can sustain a scene. It rarely sustains an entire novel unless the external conditions continue to generate conflict.

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Then there is another weak form of plotting: a story that introduces problems only to solve them too quickly.

Example: The protagonist loses a job, and a better one appears. A couple of fights, and they make peace at once. A health issue clears up. The lost object is found in the first drawer. Every complication arrives already half-resolved. This gives the illusion of activity without the weight of consequence. If a problem is worth creating, it is worth keeping alive long enough for the reader to care.

At the opposite extreme lies the overcrowded novel. Here, the writer tries to solve thinness by multiplication. New characters appear before earlier ones have settled in the reader’s mind. New subplots emerge before the central line has earned authority. Point-of-view shifts, timelines branch, and remote events are introduced long before they matter. Instead of feeling layered, the novel feels scattered.

Too many threads do not create depth on their own.

They create confusion.

A subplot earns its place only when it changes the pressure on the main story. If it does not complicate the protagonist’s decisions, sharpen the stakes, deepen the conflict, or alter the emotional field, it is not a thread. It is clutter.

This is why a strong novel usually works through interrelation.

Threads should not sit side by side like separate files. They should pull on one another. A work problem should shape the love story. A family obligation should affect the protagonist’s timing, risk, or judgment. A secret should distort more than one relationship at once. When threads touch, the novel gains density without losing coherence.

A simple test helps here: if you remove a secondary line, does the main story change?

If the answer is no, that line may be decorative rather than structural.

Another test is equally useful: if the main plot disappears for long stretches while unrelated material takes over, the book may be overbuilt.

The goal is not to make every novel large.

The goal is to make every novel alive.

A compact story can still feel full if multiple pressures meet inside it.

A large story can still feel clean if its threads are controlled.

The right question is not, “How many subplots should I have?”

The right question is, “How many active forces does this story truly need?”

In practice, that usually means resisting both laziness and panic. Laziness gives us the narrow novel, where one relationship or one inner problem is asked to carry everything. Panic gives us the overloaded novel, where every idea the writer likes is allowed into the manuscript. Neither choice shows discipline. The first withholds too much. The second admits too much.

A good plot does not merely follow one desire from page to page. It places that desire in a world of interference. Nor does it chase novelty by constant addition. It builds a field of tensions that the reader can grasp, follow, and feel.

So when you plan or revise a novel, ask two hard questions.

• First: Is this story too thin to feel like life?

• Second: Is it too crowded to feel like a story?

Between those questions lies the real work of plot design.

A novel needs enough threads to create complexity, resistance, and change. It also needs enough restraint to keep those threads from tangling into confusion.

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Source: How not to write a Novel - by Sandra Newman & Howard Mittelmark

The Writers Academy (free entry - all about screenwriting and creative writing)

3 Killing novel Mistake

Some stories do not leave you alone after you find them.

I’m sure you know this feeling.

They stay somewhere at the back of the mind, silent for a while, then return when you least expect them.

That was Orpheus and Eurydice for me.

Not simply because it is one of the great myths, nor because it has survived for centuries, but because it carries one of the deepest human wounds within it: love, loss, memory, and the impossible desire to bring back what death has taken.

What is the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice?

The short version is this.

Eurydice dies, most commonly after a snakebite.

Orpheus, shattered by grief, descends into the underworld to bring her back. His music moves the rulers of Hell, and he is granted one impossible chance: he may lead her back to the world of the living, but he must not turn around to look at her before they have fully emerged.

As everyone knows, he does look back, and in that instant, Orfeo loses Eurydice again.

That is the version most people remember. A tragic love story. A fatal mistake. A man who came close and failed.

The myth appears in ancient sources such as Apollodorus, Virgil, and Ovid, and that is part of why it has survived for so long: the bones of the story are simple, but the wound inside it is not.

In Orpheus, we do not simply see a lover. We see an artist trying to do what art has always tried to do: cross the border of loss, give form to grief, and speak to the dead as if language, music, or beauty might persuade silence to open.

Modern scholars and critics keep returning to Orpheus for exactly that reason. He becomes a figure for grief turned into song, for the artist who makes work out of absence, and for the terrible motion of looking back, the motion not only of mourning, but of writing itself.

And then there is that glance.

That one fatal movement may be the most human thing in the whole story. Depending on how you read it, it is doubt, impatience, longing, fear, lack of trust, or simple love breaking under pressure.

Some later critical traditions even treat Orpheus’s backward look as an emblem of attachment to the beloved past, the earthly thing one cannot stop reaching for, even when reaching destroys it.

That is what makes the myth feel modern even now.

It is not really about a man who made one mistake in the underworld. It is about how difficult it is for any of us to walk forward without turning back toward what we have lost.

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But I have always felt there was something even deeper in that final glance.

My take on it is this: Orpheus turns because, as they ascend together, he comes to understand that the past must be left in the past, even when it holds a tragedy he never wished had happened. Some things, however painful, must be released.

To me, his gesture is not simply weakness, doubt, or impatience. It is something more mature than that. It is the act of someone awakened, and also of someone who loves with his whole heart, because Orpheus certainly loved Eurydice.

Yet he takes on the burden of letting her go and facing forward, because that is the fate of human beings: to move through life and its losses, whatever the cost.

In the end, he does not want to violate the order of the living. So he gives his beloved one last look and lets her slip away.

That reading stayed with me for years.

Because the myth is not only about death. It is about attachment. It is about memory. It is about the temptation to return to what has already vanished. And more than that, it is about the painful knowledge that love does not always mean holding on. Sometimes love asks for the opposite. Sometimes it asks for surrender.

That is one of the reasons the myth never died. It speaks to something that remains painfully familiar. Most of us, at some point, become Orpheus in one way or another. We lose someone. Or we lose a version of our life. Or we lose a former self. And then we try, in our own way, to descend after it. Through memory. Through dreams. Through grief. Through obsession. Through art.

So, what did I do with this story and its meaning?

I wrote Echoes of Eurydice.

I did not want to simply retell the myth in its ancient form. I wanted to follow its emotional truth into a modern world. I wanted to ask what an Orpheus story might look like now, in a life marked by trauma, fractured memory, longing, and the dangerous hope that love might still survive somewhere beyond the visible world.

That is where Francesco came from.

After a devastating loss, he is left with absence more than memory. The woman he loved has slipped beyond his reach, and even her face becomes something unstable, almost impossible to hold. What remains is grief, fragments, dreams, and a need to recover what has been taken from him.

Then comes the possibility of another reality, another threshold, another descent. Not into the underworld of ancient myth, but into a place just as perilous, where love, memory, and death begin to blur into one another.

That is the heart of Echoes of Eurydice.

For me, the underworld was never only a place beneath the earth. It could also be the interior world of mourning. The broken chambers of the mind. The private darkness a person enters when loss refuses to stay still. In that sense, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice became the perfect foundation for the novel, because it already contained the questions that obsessed me most.

What does it mean to love someone after they are gone?

Can memory preserve a person, or does it only distort them?

How far would we go to see one more face, hear one more voice, recover one more moment?

And if the door opened, if the impossible became possible, would we really be ready for what waits on the other side?

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That is why this myth stayed with me. Not because it is ancient, but because it is still happening. Not literally, of course, but inwardly, emotionally, spiritually.

We are always looking back at something. A person. A wound. A version of ourselves that no longer exists. We all carry our own underworld in some form.

Echoes of Eurydice was born from that feeling.

From the belief that some losses do not disappear. They echo. They change shape. They become dreams, guilt, longing, symbols, songs, and stories. They move through us for years, sometimes quietly, sometimes like a storm.

And perhaps that is what the myth understood long before we did.

That love does not end when someone vanishes.

It becomes an echo.

Echoes of Eurydice by Marcello Iori

After a devastating loss, Francesco is left with a fractured mind and a grief he cannot fully name. When he is offered a path into another reality where the dead may still be reached, he follows it in the hope of finding love again. But some journeys into the dark do not return us to what we had. They reveal what we are willing to risk, what we cannot reclaim, and what it truly means to let go.

… with a romantic (and tragic) core.

PS if you like writing, consider joining my free Skool Community: Eden for Writers

The instructions came through the app at 10:43 p.m.

Rule number one: follow the illuminated path.

Rule number two: never step out of the light, never enter the dark.

Rule number three: leave the package on the kitchen table.

Rule number four: once you have left the package, you have 30 minutes to turn back.

Rule number five: Again, never enter the dark, never step out of the light.

Rule number six: if you break even one of these rules, The Miller Corporation declines any liability and rejects any claim, complaint, or attempt at extortion.

One-time code: 0719.

P.S. Tip included: 1000 dollar.

Under normal circumstances, Evelin would have laughed and sent the screenshot to one of the other drivers; instead, she called John, her employer.

“Don’t tell me you took that delivery?” he laughed.

“Yes. I was just ready for my night out, but then I saw the tip and... tell me this is a joke.”

“I’m sorry, Evelin. Mr Miller is one of our biggest clients. But to be honest, we’d never delivered to that address before. Still, yes, Evelin, get in and get out quickly.”

“Yeah, I don’t want to get into trouble with a billionaire.”

She ended the call with a sigh.

Last delivery of the night.

Peter was with her in the car, grinning, dressed for the party they were meant to hit in forty minutes. He had on a black shirt open at the throat and too much cologne, and he kept drumming on the steering wheel and asking if she was sure they had time.

“We have time,” she said.

“You always say that when we absolutely don’t.”

“I said yes to the shift because I need rent money.”

“And I said yes to driving you because I’m a saint.”

“You said yes because you were scared I’d go to the party without you.”

“That too.”

He smiled. She tried not to smile back and failed.

The address took them out of the part of the city where the roads still had streetlights and into a stretch of dark hill roads lined with dead winter grass and stone walls. On the left, the land dropped away into blackness. On the right, behind the trees, houses appeared now and then, as expensive ships abandoned in glassed water.

Then the navigation said they had arrived.

The gate was twelve feet high, black iron, with a keypad inset into a pillar of pale concrete. Beyond it, there was no house. Only the darkness and a big red dot afar.

Peter whistled.

“Million-dollar place,” he said.

“Try ten.”

She got out, cold air striking her bare legs.

She had dressed for the party before the last call at work: black boots, dark green dress, little silver earrings, a coat too thin for the season.

The surprise bags rested in the back seat. When she shut the car door, the quiet of the property settled around them with a strange weight.

No dogs.

No insects.

No distant traffic.

Just the faint electrical hum of something hidden.

She keyed in the code.

The gate clicked and swung inward a fraction.

Then the lights came on, piercing through the night in a long streak of paved path.

Not floodlights. Not porch lights. Small, recessed lamps in the ground, spaced every few feet, revealed a narrow white path of poured concrete that curved away through the trees.

Beyond the clear ribbon of light stretched a blackness so complete it appeared almost solid, as if the path had been cut through a wall of ink.

Peter leaned in and peered.

“That’s creepy as hell.”

“Stay in the car, then.”

“Absolutely not.”

He helped Evelin lift the surprise bag, almost certain that it contained an expensive diamond or so.

They followed the path. The ground lamps gave them just enough to see one step ahead, no more. The darkness on either side felt patient. Close. It reminded Evelin of the sea at night when she was a child, standing on a beach and knowing something immense moved just beyond the last silver edge of moonlight.

She checked the instructions again.

Follow the illuminated path.

“Who writes stuff like this?” Peter murmured.

“Someone rich enough to make weirdness part of the décor.”

“Or someone trying to get us murdered.”

She meant to laugh. The sound died in her throat.

The path turned once, then again, and the house finally appeared.

Or part of it did.

A low, angular structure of concrete and glass emerged from the dark like a bunker built for people who feared daylight.

The only visible door opens the moment the two friends step onto the porch, silently, giving the impression that its panels are as light as drawing paper.

As they step inside, the first room rises out of the night. Bare. A white square like a sacred wafer.

They pass through it, whispering, then into another room just like the first, and then another, until they reach something familiar: a modern kitchen. The kind with a central island, a bathroom, a pantry, and French doors opening onto the back.

“Hello?” Evelin called.

“Come on, Eve, who else do you think is here?”

She nodded, silently.

A bowl of lemons. Stainless steel appliances. A knife block. White cabinets with no handles. The kind of place that looked as if nobody had ever fried an onion in it.

She set the gift on the counter.

Peter started to browse around, trying to open a drawer but failing.

“There,” she said. “Done.”

“Eve.”

Her app still showed Delivery pending.

“Eve?”

“What? Let’s get out of here. We have 25 minutes left.”

“It’s all locked. Look! I can’t open the fridge.”

“I don’t care”, she stated, feeling unease.

“This place is… crazy.”

“Let’s go.”

She took out her phone, ready to mark it complete, then noticed another note at the bottom of the instructions.

Photograph the order on the island and send confirmation manually.

Of course.

She took the photo.

Peter had moved closer. In the bright kitchen light, his face looked younger than it did in bars or in the car, all bravado stripped off him. He put his hands on her waist and kissed her neck.

“Peter.”

“What?”

“We’re in somebody’s house.”

“In their kitchen. Technically.”

“That’s not better.”

“No one’s here.”

“You don’t know that.”

He kissed her again, slower this time. She smelled wine on his breath from the can he had opened before the drive. He had that reckless mood in him, the one that made him charming right up to the point where he became stupid.

“We’ll be late,” she said, though the word came out weak.

“So, we’ll be fashionably late.”

He touched the side zipper of her dress. “Come on. Last delivery of the night. Million-dollar kitchen. Make it a story.”

“It’s already a story. A bad one.”

Still, she did not move away.

Peter smiled like he knew he had won and hated himself a little for being right.

He lifted her onto the island.

“You are trouble” she said, smiling.

“This place scares the shit out of me.”

“The dark outside...” she started, hesitating as she thought.

“I know.”

Peter took off her dress from her head.

The stone was cold under her thighs. She whispered his name once in protest and once for another reason entirely. Her coat slipped to the floor.

Peter kissed her hard, hungrily, as if the stillness of the house excited him. The bright lamps above them threw harsh, clean light on skin, on hands, on the gleam of the steel sink.

Then a glass shattered somewhere in the dark.

Not in the kitchen.

Further in.

The sound cracked through the house like a gunshot.

Peter froze.

Evelin pushed him back at once, slid off the island, breathing hard.

“Someone’s here.”

“No kidding.”

Another sound came after it.

A soft scraping. Then nothing.

Peter zipped his trousers and glanced toward the kitchen opening, beyond which the rest of the house lay in lightless silence.

“Maybe they saw us. Rich people have cameras everywhere.’

“Forget that. We’re leaving.”

But Peter was already listening with that ugly male mixture of embarrassment and anger.

“If some creep’s standing there watching…”

“Peter.”

He took two steps toward the dark hall.

On the wall near the opening, in small black letters almost invisible against the paint, Evelin noticed a plaque she had missed on the way in.

DO NOT LEAVE THE LIT AREAS.

Her mouth went dry.

“Peter, stop.”

He half turned.

“What?”

“There’s a sign.”

He squinted. “Is this a joke?”

“I don’t care. We’re done. Come back.”

He looked into the dark again. Something in him refused retreat now that fear had been named.

“Stay there,” he said.

“Don’t be an idiot.”

“I’ll just check.”

He pulled out his phone, thumbed on the flashlight, and stepped beyond the bright kitchen threshold.

The light from his phone did not travel far.

It seemed to hit the darkness and weaken, as if the air itself swallowed it.

“Peter.”

He moved another pace into the hall.

“Come on,” he muttered. “Who’s there?”

She watched the white beam wobble across the polished floor, a wall, and the edge of what might have been a staircase.

Then the beam jerked violently upward.

Peter gave a short grunt.

The light spun once, hit the ceiling, and vanished.

Peter vanished too.

“Peter?”

Silence.

“Peter!”

She ran to the edge of the kitchen light and stopped there so fast her boots squealed on the floor.

Something in the dark was breathing.

Not near.

All around.

Evelin could not locate it. It was the sound of wind pushing through a forest of throats.

“Peter, answer me.”

For one bright, insane second, Evelin thought she saw him standing just beyond the reach of the kitchen lamps.

Then she understood it was only her imagination.

She backed away, dialling a number on her phone.

The ringtone began somewhere in the dark hall.

It moved.

Swinging.

“Peter, for God’s sake, I don’t like this prank.”

No answer.

“You know what? I’m leaving. I don’t like this.”

Evelin hurried out of the kitchen, confused and scared. That darkness is not normal, she kept thinking.

Stay in the light.

Stay in the light.

Stay in the light.

Someone took him, she knew.

The ground lamps seemed dimmer on the way back.

Or maybe it was only that the dark beyond them had grown thicker, leaning inward. Her car was no longer visible through the trees. The path twisted. Her breath snagged in her throat.

She reached the point where the path forked around a stand of cypress.

Her phone rang.

The screen showed JOHN.

She almost cried with relief.

John owned the delivery place. He was fifty-two, sweaty even in winter, always smelling faintly of chicken fried and aftershave, and for some reason, his ordinary, irritating existence now seemed like the holiest thing in the world.

She answered at once.

“John.”

“Evelin? What’s going on? I didn’t get your completion text. Client’s asking if the surprise is in place.”

“John, listen to me. Peter is gone.”

A pause.

“What?”

“He went into the dark inside the house, and he’s gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?”

“I mean, gone. Something took him.”

John exhaled loudly and disbelievingly. “Are you high?”

“No.”

“Did he run off? Is this some joke because you want to avoid a complaint?”

“John.” She heard herself on the edge of hysteria and forced her voice down. “Come here. Please. Something is wrong with this place.”

He cursed under his breath.

“The owner gave me a backup code in case this exact kind of thing happened,” he said. “Told me his rules were simple and young people always messed them up.”

“What rules?”

“Stay on the lit path. Don’t enter the unlit areas. Deliver and leave.”

Her grip tightened on the phone.

“He knew.”

“I’m on my way.”

“No, call the police.”

“And tell them what? That your boyfriend wandered off in a rich guy’s house because you two couldn’t follow a simple instruction?”

Something in the frankness of that made her shut her eyes.

John softened, just a little.

“Listen. Stay where the lights are. Do not move. I’m twenty minutes out.”

She did not say yes. She did not say anything.

He hung up.

She was alone again.

The path stretched before her in both directions, each section lit by its little ground lamps, each curve hiding the next. To one side, the house glowed red through a distant wall of glass, the house entrance lights now looking less like safety than like bait.

She took one careful step forward.

Then another.

Somewhere in the dark, close enough to hear, Peter made a sound.

A wet choking gasp.

“Peter?”

No answer. Again.

Only that terrible breathing, slow and full of hunger.

John arrived with the sound of gravel under tyres and his own voice on the phone before she saw him.

“I’m at the gate,” he said. “Entering now.”

She remained on the path, turning in circles, attempting not to look into the darkness, a solid wall of ink. Even John noticed that the night around seemed thick like petrol, an unnatural darkness.

“It’s like… dark water.”

Seconds later, she heard him far off, swearing quietly as he came along the lamps.

Then he stopped.

“What the hell.”

“What?”

“There’s blood here.”

She could picture him wiping sweat from his upper lip with the back of his hand.

“John?”

He did not answer at once.

When he did, his voice had changed.

“There’s a leg.”

Her stomach turned.

“What?”

“A leg. Cut off clean. Wearing a bloody Converse.”

Peter had not been wearing Converse.

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

Then John said, very softly, “That’s not your boy.”

Evelin began to cry without noise, tears sliding cold down her face.

John kept coming.

They started talking constantly then, not because it helped, but because silence allowed the house to breathe between them.

He told her where he was on the path. She told him where she could see the red glow of the house. Every so often, they called each other’s names just to prove they were both still there.

At one bend, Evelin heard him so close she frozen.

“John?”

“I’m here.”

“How far?”

“Sounds like nothing. A few feet.”

“I can’t see you.”

“Neither can I, but… there is something inside.”

Evelin understood Peter was referring to the darkness that kept them apart.

Their voices were almost level. Same height. Same distance. Yet between the pools of light where each of them stood lay only thick black space, as if the paths had been built side by side with darkness packed between them like earth between graves.

“Don’t come off the path,” he whispered.

“I know.”

“No. Listen to me. Don’t even try. There’s really something in there.”

He breathed into the phone. She could hear his fear now, and beneath it his stubbornness.

“What did it do to Peter?”

“I don’t know.”

“That leg back there…”

“It wasn’t Peter.”

“No.” A pause. “Which means this has happened before.”

The phone buzzed in his hand.

“Owner,” he said. “Martin Miller.”

“Put him on speaker”, asked Evelin.

John did.

A man’s voice entered the night, controlled and furious.

“What have you done?”

John barked back before fear could slow him. “Your place is a death trap. A kid’s dead.”

“Did you leave the instructed areas?”

“She did not. The boyfriend did.”

On the line, a silence as thin as wire.

Then Miller said, “Then the boyfriend is dead. You need to remain where you are until I arrive.”

Evelin stared into the dark, all tears gone.

“You knew that would happen,” she said.

“Yes.”

“What is in here?” John asked.

Miller exhaled through his nose, as if he despised being forced into the conversation. “A contained failure.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s top secret.”

“What is it?” John shouted.

Another pause. Then, in a flatter voice: “A military experiment. Directional sensory aggression. Adaptive predatory response. It should not have retained autonomy.”

Evelin felt the words slide over her without meaning at first.

John sounded equally lost. “Speak English.”

“It hunts movement and heat in unregulated dark. Stay in the light. Do not attempt exit. I’m less than an hour away.”

“You kept this thing in your house?” Evelin said.

“It was dormant.”

A laugh burst out of her then, high and cracked.

“Dormant.”

Miller ignored her. “Whatever you hear, do not step into darkness. I mean that literally. Not one inch.”

The call ended.

John swore until he ran out of breath.

Then he said, “All right. We keep moving toward the main house. Paths have to join somewhere.”

Evelin looked ahead. The red glow in the distance pulsed faintly on the glass.

“We talk the whole time,” she said.

“Whole time.”

“If it sounds like we’re farther apart…”

“We stop.”

They began.

At first, it worked.

Each bend in the lit path brought them closer to the house’s red glass wall. She could hear the scrape of John’s shoes, his short breath, the damp labour of his lungs. He was overweight and diabetic, and always promising himself he would eat better after the holidays. He sounded now like a man dragging his whole life behind him.

Then Peter’s head rolled into Evelin’s light.

It came from the dark as neatly as if set down by a hand.

Peter’s eyes were open.

His mouth hung slack. Blood had blackened at the neck. One cheek was gone, stripped to pale wet meat.

Evelin screamed.

She went backwards so fast her heel slipped off the path. The darkness touched the side of her boot like cold water.

“Evelin!” John shouted.

She flung herself back into the centre of the light, sobbing.

“It’s Peter. Oh God, it’s Peter’s… head.”

“Don’t move. Don’t move.”

She bent over, hands on knees, retching but bringing up nothing.

Peter’s head watched her from the path.

Its lips had been torn into an eerie smile.

“Talk to me,” John said.

“I’m here.”

“Good. Good. Don’t look at it.”

“It rolled to me.”

“Don’t look at it.”

“I’m trying.”

“Keep talking. Can you still see the house?”

“Yes.”

“Then we keep going.”

She forced herself forward. When she passed the head, she kept her face turned away, but still saw it as a memory.

Then John stopped answering.

“John?”

He did not reply.

The lights along his stretch of path, and behind, began to go out one by one.

Click.

Dark.

Click.

Dark.

A chain of extinction moving toward him.

He made a sound that was half curse, half prayer.

“John?”

“They’re dying,” he said. “The lights are dying.”

“Stand still.”

“I am.”

Click.

Dark.

Click.

Dark.

The black closed around him in sections, eating the path from both directions until, by the sound of his breathing, it had come within inches of his face.

“Don’t run,” she said.

“I can still see the house.” Blurred. A blurred red dot.

“Don’t.”

“If I go straight…”

“No.”

“It’s right there.”

“John, please.”

His voice broke then. “I can feel it.”

Something moved around him in the dark. Fast. Circular. A low-friction, like a wet canvas, dragged over wood.

“John, stay where you are.”

“I can’t.”

He felt trapped, as though inside a glass cylinder. If he moved sideways, or even took half a step back, that solid wall of black would swallow him.

Then he ran.

“Follow me. Move before the lights go out.”

She heard him go with the heavy, desperate clumsiness of a man not built for sprinting, shoes slapping concrete, breath tearing in and out. He got perhaps six steps.

Then he cried out.

A blow.

A stumble.

A meaty rip.

He fell to one knee, still trying to move, making an awful sobbing grunt as if something had opened his leg to the bone.

That blackness was dense and cold. He had been right to think it looked like black water. A sea of ink as light as air.

If he hadn’t been overweight, perhaps he would have overcome that drag, and maybe he even could have endured a wound like that.

“Get up!” she screamed, though she knew he could not.

He made one last sound.

Then there came a wet crack, quick and final.

Silence followed.

No body thud.

No dragging.

Just silence.

And then, from very far away, a small object bounced once on concrete.

It sounded like a ring striking stone.

Evelin somehow made her way to the house, sneaking into the kitchen where it all started.

She waited. Then started crying. Called the police. Someone on the other side of the line asked her name.

“Evelin, Evelin Kent. Please, help. Something horrible happened.”

She gave the address explaining everything.

“A squad will be with you in twenty minutes.”

“No, please. You don’t understand, two people are dead. Maybe more. And I don’t know how...”

The line went silent. Evelin tried calling the police switchboard again, but there was no signal.

Evelin felt she had to do something, that despair would not help her in a situation like this.

She looked around for a weapon. Peter had been right, every drawer and cupboard was locked, nothing could be opened. There was one thing, though: the gift package. She opened it. Inside a finely embroidered casket, she found a gold watch, an ancient artefact, like certain objects she had seen in a documentary about the Aztecs. It was as large as a fist, with visible gears shaped in geometric patterns. Even if it was not a knife, she could still use it as a weapon.

She did not move.

When Martin Miller finally arrived, he came in through the kitchen with metal case in one hand

He was in his sixties, handsome in the dry, polished way of men who had spent money avoiding age. Silver hair. Camel coat. Bloodless mouth. He did not ask if she was hurt.

He only looked at the room, at her, at the floor, calculating damage.

“I’m sorry for the unpleasantness,” he said.

She stared. Angry. Furious. Petrified. All together.

He set the case on the island and clicked it open.

Stacks of cash.

More money than she had ever seen outside a film.

“Take it,” he said. “And understand me very clearly. If you speak about tonight to anyone, your life will become impossible.”

She looked at the money, then at him.

“My boyfriend is dead.”

“Yes.”

“You kept that thing here.”

“Yes.”

“John is dead too.”

Miller gave the smallest shrug, almost bored. “John was not instructed to come.”

Evelin’s hands curled into fists. “Keep your money.”

His eyes rested on her for a moment longer.

“Very well. But you will remain silent.”

She thought of Peter’s head on the path. Of John disappearing into inches of dark. Of the severed leg in the Converse sneaker.

“I’ll stay silent,” she said.

“For your own sake, do. This is motherfucker military issue.”

He picked up something else. In his other hand was something small and black, a remote with a sliding switch and three red buttons.

“Come,” he said. “I’ll take you out.”

She followed because there was nothing else to do, but once they left the kitchen, she understood clearly what was going to happen next.

This was not the way she had come.

The floor beneath her feet shifted from smooth stone to a gridded metal walkway. The walls narrowed. The air grew colder. No scent of the outside. No hint of the gate.

He was taking her deeper.

She stopped.

Miller turned.

“What are you doing?”

“This isn’t the entrance.”

“It’s another route.”

“No.”

She heard the conviction in her own voice and knew it was true. After four hours in light and dark, she knew the house the way people know a nightmare while they are still inside it. By instinct. By pressure. By the movement of fear.

“This is a trap.”

Miller’s expression changed, losing all pretence of civility. “You are exhausted. Keep walking.”

She raised the ancient clock from inside her coat and held it out with a shaking hand.

“I want the real exit.”

He looked at his gift and then laughed.

A genuine laugh.

“You broke the rules,” he said. “You and your little boyfriend. Do you know how many times I made those rules simple? Deliver the package. Leave. Do not step into the dark. Do not linger. But people always linger. They always imagine the world is theirs.”

She backed away a step, silent.

“You said I could leave.”

“I said many things to keep you functional.”

“Bastard.”

“I cannot let you leave alive after direct exposure,” he said. “Not after the breach.”

Something in the calm way he said it made her lunge before she had truly decided to.

The clock cut his sleeve and skidded over bone. He cursed, seized her wrist, and slammed her against the wall. Pain burst through her shoulder. The ancient clock dropped. They grappled in the narrow, lit strip of corridor, shoes slipping, breath harsh and close.

He was stronger than he looked.

He twisted her arm until she cried out.

Then he did a stupid thing.

He reached too far.

His left arm crossed the line where the light ended.

What took it did so instantly.

No warning.

No visible form.

Only a chop of force and a spray of blood.

Miller screamed.

His severed forearm slapped the wall and fell at Evelin’s feet.

He staggered back, clutching the stump, eyes wide now with real animal terror.

Evelin snatched the remote from his hand.

He lunged for her.

She shoved him toward the dark, not enough to lose balance but enough to buy one step, then another. He was swearing, choking, trying to press his coat against the wound.

She ran.

The remote was slick with his blood. She hit one button by accident and lights flared somewhere ahead, a path igniting in sections. Another button made a steel door slide open.

She kept going.

Her side burned. At some point in the struggle, he had got hold of the clock, or maybe a shard of something sharp, because her ribs were wet and hot under the dress.

She did not stop.

Behind her, Miller shouted in fury and pain.

Ahead, the house unfolded in brief violent glimpses: red-lit glass, an exterior walkway, steps descending toward the grounds. Beyond them, at last, the front approach and the gate.

She could smell the night air.

And freedom.

And from the darkness on either side of the lit route came a sound like a storm pushing through pine trees.

Not wind.

A whistle.

Many whistles in one.

A howling whistle, rising and falling, almost like an enormous orc calling through a forest of metal.

She ran faster.

The gate stood ahead, half open.

A woman stepped into the light.

Elegant. Red. Mid-forties. Wool coat, gloves, pistol held low and steady as if it belonged in her hand.

Evelin almost did not understand what she was seeing. Not after everything else.

Then the woman sighed.

“Martin always gets himself into trouble,” she said. “And I am always the one who has to finish things.”

The gun came up.

Evelin lifted the remote as if it might save her.

The shot struck her in the chest.

The force turned Evelin and dropped her to her knees. She felt no pain at first. Only astonishment. The gate beyond the woman blurred and doubled. The remote slid away.

Behind her, from deep inside the grounds, Martin Miller was still screaming.

The woman approached cautiously, eyes never leaving Evelin’s face.

For a second, the darkness on both sides of the path seemed to swell, leaning closer, listening.

The woman frowned and glanced toward it.

That was all.

A moment.

A fraction.

Enough for the dark to move.

Something rushed up to the very edge of the light but did not cross. It made the lamps flicker. The sound it gave was neither a roar nor a cry. It was the voice of winter trees in a gale, of iron bending, of hunger discovering one more name.

Evelin toppled sideways onto the concrete.

Her cheek touched the cold white path.

She could see the woman’s shoes. Fine black leather, already dotted with blood.

Could smell earth, ozone, cordite.

Could hear the thing in the dark circling without footsteps.

The woman retreated by inches, keeping within the light, gun aimed now at nothing Evelin could see.

“Martin,” she called, but there was no answer anymore.

Only the dark.

Only that whistling, rising and falling through the grounds like something old and delighted.

Evelin tried to move.

Her arms would not listen.

She thought, absurdly, of the app still open on her phone.

Delivery pending.

She almost laughed.

Almost.

Then the lights along the path began to go out, one by one, starting from the gate.

Click.

Dark.

Click.

Dark.

The woman stepped back, suddenly afraid now, truly afraid, and fired twice into the black to no effect at all.

Click.

Dark.

Click.

Dark.

The last thing Evelin saw was the woman’s face changing as she understood the simple arithmetic of distance and failing light.

Then the final lamp near Evelin shivered.

And went out.

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That’s why I believe this course is very powerful for anyone who wants to tap into screenwriting.

I’ve written a lot and left some interesting articles about it here and there.

It’s up to you now. Free entry to my Skool channel (for now).

See you there :)

If you want the brutal truth: most novels don’t fail because the prose is “bad.” They fail because the writer makes promises the story never keeps, or delays the story until the reader stops caring.

Below are three high-impact mistakes with a practical fix for each, plus a few reinforcing points from the wider craft conversation.

1. The Waiting Room: you start too early (and call it “setup”)
   This is the classic slow bleed: pages of childhood, background, job history, scenic context—while the actual story hasn’t arrived yet. The reader keeps waiting for the first important event, and you keep feeding them “pre-story.”

Fix: cut to the first irreversible pressure.
If your protagonist can still go home and keep living the same life, you’re not in the story yet. Find the first moment that changes the character’s options—then begin there.

You can still deliver background. But earn it. Once the story has momentum, you can pause to clarify what the reader needs. Writers often call this starting in medias res: you begin in the middle of a meaningful conflict, then reveal context later, selectively.

Quick test: “What is the first important event?”
Everything before that is a candidate for deletion or compression. Twenty pages of preamble can often become a paragraph (or a few lines slipped in later) if the scene you start with is strong enough.

Micro-example
Instead of opening with a character’s long childhood history that “explains why he became a doctor,” open with him in the ER, hands shaking, making the wrong call—then let the backstory leak in only when it becomes emotionally necessary.

2. The Gum on the Mantelpiece: You plant details that never pay off
   Readers are pattern machines. If you draw attention to a detail—an object, a secret, a line of dialogue, a suspicious character—you create a promise. When the promise doesn’t pay off, the reader feels cheated, even if they can’t articulate why.

This is basically Chekhov’s principle in modern clothes: if you hang a rifle on the wall, it must matter later; otherwise, remove it.

Fix: make every “highlighted” detail either pay off or transform.
Two clean options:

A) Payoff: the object/seed returns and changes the plot.
B) Transformation: it returns in a way that changes meaning (the same detail becomes a twist, a reversal, a moral cost, a reveal).

Quick test: highlight your “promises.”
Anything you spotlight (not just mention) should have an endpoint. If you introduce “gum on the mantelpiece” in chapter one, it must end up on something by the last chapter—otherwise it’s narrative sloppiness.

Micro-example
If you introduce a character’s allergy in chapter two with emphasis, either use it as a constraint (it blocks a plan), a reveal (it exposes a lie), or a consequence (it turns a small decision into a crisis). If it never returns, it was useless and painful. Ok?

A cousin of this mistake is the fake red herring (“Red herring” is a narrative term for a false lead: a clue or highlighted element designed to make the reader believe something (usually who the culprit is, what’s about to happen, or what the real issue is), while the truth is something else): you mislead the reader without playing fair. A red herring can be great, but it has to feel earned—built from established characters and believable choices—so the reader enjoys being misdirected rather than feeling tricked.

3. The Vacation Slide Show: you substitute description for story.
   Another silent killer: the novel becomes a travelogue of “amazing” places and “unbelievable” experiences, yet the protagonist isn’t under pressure. The writing points to a landscape rather than forcing a change.

The reader doesn’t want your slideshow. They want a storyline: what’s happening to the protagonist now.

Fix: make the setting serve conflict, not the other way round.
Place is powerful when it restricts choices, creates danger, exposes desire, or forces a decision. Place is weak when it’s only a backdrop for adjectives.

Quick test: “What does this setting do to my character?”
If the answer is “it looks beautiful,” you’re not using the setting yet. If the answer is “it makes her lie,” “it corners him,” “it reminds her of what she lost,” or “it forces a choice,” now you’re in business.

Micro-example (rewritten):
Don’t describe the city as “indescribable.” Put your character in a street where they must decide whether to follow someone, betray someone, or lose the one chance they came for. Then the city becomes story, not wallpaper.

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A note from the wider craft world: readers dislike info-dumping for the same reason they dislike travelogue writing—it postpones lived experience. They opened the book for motion and consequence, not an encyclopedia.

The single principle that ties all three together.

Briefly.

Respect the reader’s sense of cause-and-effect.

Start where something changes.
Make promises you intend to keep.
Use description only when it increases pressure.

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Source for more: How not to write a novel - Sandra Newman & Howard Mittelmark

My community Skool of Creative Writing - Free entry - Screenwriting Masterclass available

Marcello Iori

Is Your Screenplay Ready? Before You Submit Your Script

A Practical Readiness Check…

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a month ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Mars

A Practical Readiness Check

A screenplay isn’t “ready” when you feel proud of it. It’s ready when it reads like a film—clear, purposeful, and alive— without the reader needing to work to understand what you meant.

I know — they haven’t spent dozens of hours writing. Maybe you’ve had to give up something important, not once, but many times. I’ve published nine books in eight years. One of those books came from a screenplay (optioned, but in Italian). So, to do what I’ve done, I’ve had to say no to a lot of social occasions. However, as writers, we shouldn’t give up too much of the worldly side of life, because that’s often where the inspiration to write something worthwhile comes from.

No one will ever fully understand a writer’s dedication or that clash of emotions. And once we’re finished, it still isn’t finished.

It’s better to know what to do after you complete the first draft. I hope these points can help you.

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Use this readiness check before you send your script to anyone.

1. The first ten pages earn trust
   By page ten, a professional reader should know three things without effort: who the story follows, what “normal life” looks like, and what pressure has begun to crack that normal. If your opening pages feel like a warm-up, the script is not ready. Your opening must already contain tension, movement, and intent.

2. Your protagonist wants something specific
   A protagonist can be complex and contradictory, but their objective can’t be fog. If a reader can’t answer “What does this character want right now?” the story drifts. The audience doesn’t need a moral lesson; they need a desire under pressure.

3. Cause-and-effect is unbroken
   Read your script scene by scene and ask a brutal question: “Does this happen because of what came before?” If the honest answer is “It happens because the writer needed it,” you’ve found a weak link. Good scripts feel inevitable because each event forces the next.

4. Every scene changes something
   A scene is not there to “show a moment.” It’s there to create change: a new decision, a new piece of information, a shift in power, a crack in a relationship, a cost paid. If the protagonist ends the scene emotionally and strategically identical to how they entered it, the scene is likely dead weight.

5. Act Two doesn’t sag
   Most scripts fail in the middle. The test is simple: does pressure escalate, or does it repeat? Your second act should tighten the screws through reversals, rising stakes, and decisions that close doors. If the middle feels like “more of the same,” the structure isn’t holding.

6. Dialogue carries subtext and tension
   If your dialogue exists mainly to explain, your script isn’t ready. Strong dialogue acts. It negotiates power, hides truth, reveals contradiction, and forces reactions. Cut any line that says what the audience can already see. Replace explanation with behaviour, silence, and consequence.

7. The script is visual, not literary
   A screenplay is a blueprint for images and sound. If your pages rely on internal narration, abstract adjectives, or long explanations of emotion, the reader cannot “see” the film/movie. Your job is not to describe feelings. Your job is to create the visible conditions that produce them.

8. The ending resolves the inner and outer journey
   A climax is not just an event, it’s a final choice under maximum pressure. Your ending should feel like the only possible result of everything that came before—and it should complete the protagonist’s transformation, whether that transformation is growth, collapse, or tragic clarity.

9. Readability is effortless
   This is the unglamorous test, and it’s the one that decides careers. The script must read cleanly: lean action lines, clear intent, no confusion, no clutter. A readable script is a professional courtesy to the reader.

A final rule
If you hesitate to send the script because you know the reader will “misunderstand,” that’s usually not a reader problem. It’s a clarity problem. Fix clarity, and confidence follows.

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In every creative pursuit—whether writing, painting, entrepreneurship, or research—there exists an invisible adversary.

It is not the market, the critic, or the lack of opportunity.

It is what Steven Pressfield names with surgical precision: Resistance.

His book The War of Art is both a diagnosis and a declaration of battle against this inner force that prevents us from doing our work.

Pressfield’s insight is deceptively simple: the artist’s greatest struggle is not against others but against the self.

Yet within this simplicity lies an entire philosophy of creative discipline, one that unites psychology, spirituality, and craftsmanship.

Like a modern Stoic, Pressfield writes calmly, having fought the war daily and learnt its rules through defeat.

The Anatomy of Resistance

Resistance is the universal enemy of creation.

It manifests as procrastination, self-doubt, distraction, and fear.

“Resistance is insidious,” he writes, “Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work.”

It disguises itself as rational caution, domestic duty, even modesty.

Its nature is protean because it arises from the very faculty it seeks to sabotage: imagination.

Pressfield treats Resistance not as a metaphor but as a psychological constant—inevitable and internal. Its goal is paralysis.

The more meaningful a project, the stronger Resistance becomes.

This paradox reveals a crucial law of creative work: what we most fear doing is often what we most need to do.

The magnitude of fear becomes the compass of purpose.

By externalising Resistance, Pressfield grants it form. He turns an abstract feeling into an opponent that can be recognised, named, and fought.

This act of personification transforms helplessness into agency.

The artist ceases to be a victim of mood and becomes a soldier of will.

The Professional and the Amateur

The heart of The War of Art lies in the distinction between the amateur and the professional.

The amateur works when inspired; the professional works despite resistance.

The amateur treats art as emotion; the professional treats it as a vocation.

Pressfield insists that professionalism is not cynicism but devotion.

The professional shows up every day, not for praise or validation, but for the work itself.

“The most important thing about art,” he writes, “is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.”

The line is almost monastic in its austerity.

Discipline, not inspiration, is the foundation of freedom.

This ethic echoes throughout the history of craftsmanship.

The stone mason, the violinist, the scientist—all understand that mastery arises through ritual.

Routine, rather than spontaneity, becomes the temple of creativity. To commit one’s day to the craft, regardless of outcome, is the modern form of faith.

Fear as Compass

Pressfield makes a provocative assertion: fear is not an obstacle but a guide.

The stronger the fear, the more certain its corresponding task is significant.

“The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work,” he writes. “The professional knows that fear can never be overcome. He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist.”

This redefinition transforms fear from enemy into ally.

For the writer, it means that the blank page should be frightening—it signals the threshold of growth.

For the entrepreneur, it means that discomfort marks innovation.

Courage, therefore, is not the absence of fear but the mastery of it through consistent practice.

In this sense, The War of Art aligns with both Stoicism and Frankl’s existentialism: suffering and resistance are not to be escaped but to be transfigured.

The act of creation becomes the act of moral endurance.

The Spiritual Dimension

In its final section, Pressfield’s book unexpectedly turns toward the metaphysical.

He introduces the concept of the Muse, drawn from ancient Greek tradition, as the mysterious ally that aids the disciplined artist.

When one sits down daily to perform the work, he suggests, unseen forces align to assist.

“When we sit down day after day and keep grinding,” he writes, “power concentrates around us.”

This idea does not require superstition to be understood.

The Muse is Pressfield’s symbol for momentum—the cumulative force that builds when action replaces hesitation.

Habit creates its own divinity.

By invoking the divine, Pressfield restores reverence to labour.

Work is no longer merely economic; it becomes a sacred participation in creation itself.

Resistance in the Modern World

In a digital age of infinite distraction, Pressfield’s concept of Resistance feels prophetic.

Each notification, each algorithmic lure, manifests the same force he described twenty years ago.

The battlefield has expanded but not changed. The war remains within.

Professionals across every field recognise the pattern: the moment one approaches meaningful work, the impulse to check, defer, or avoid intensifies.

Resistance thrives on immediacy; deep work requires patience.

The solution, as Pressfield insists, is brutally simple—begin.

The act of beginning dissolves the spell of inertia.

Once in motion, energy builds, and the invisible enemy retreats.

The Moral of Work

Resistance is not only psychological but ethical. To yield to it is to betray one’s potential; to fight it is to honour one’s gift.

“If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), ‘Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?’” he observes, “the answer is yes. You are. The amateur is terrified. The professional is terrified too. But he keeps working.”

This insistence on perseverance transforms art into a form of character.

Each day’s labour becomes an act of moral alignment—between intention and action, between calling and courage.

The professional accepts the loneliness of the task as the price of authenticity.

This ethic is indispensable for those engaged in intellectual or creative pursuits.

It defines success not by recognition but by constancy.

The writer who writes despite obscurity, the speaker who practises despite indifference, already wins the invisible war.

Conclusion

The War of Art endures because it translates the abstract struggle of creativity into a universal narrative of resistance and triumph.

It reminds us that genius is not bestowed but earned through defiance of inertia.

The book’s power lies in its simplicity: start, continue, and trust that discipline will summon grace.

In the end, Pressfield offers not a strategy but a creed: work is salvation.

To sit down each day and face the blank page is to confront the self, and to emerge, however slightly, victorious.

The invisible enemy never vanishes, but through practice, it learns to fear you.

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As Christmas approaches, take care of yourself. Tell me what your plan is for the festivities

A writer has one practical job: to keep the reader turning pages. Style matters, language matters, voice matters—but nothing moves a reader forward like plot.

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Plot is not a genre. It’s a force. It’s the question that pulls the reader into the next paragraph because something is unresolved and pressing. That pressure can be emotional, intellectual, or physical.

Emotional pressure is the itch of the heart. Will she betray her closest friend to protect her brother? Will he finally tell the truth that could end his marriage but save his child? These aren’t “feelings on the page”; they’re choices with consequences, and the reader turns pages to see which choice wins.

Intellectual pressure is the itch of the mind. Who altered the medical report? Why does every witness describe the same detail that never happened? The reader turns pages because the story promises an answer, and each scene should narrow the possibilities or complicate them in a satisfying way.

Physical pressure is the itch of survival. Can they cross the border before dawn? Can he get out of the apartment before the elevator reaches his floor? Here the page-turn comes from motion and danger, but it still depends on cause and effect—action that changes the situation rather than action that simply fills space.

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A good novel (and a good script) typically begins with someone we can attach to—a character with a thorny problem that cannot be solved by staying the same.

As the story thickens, the character spends resources to overcome the problem: time, pride, relationships, money, safety, identity. New information arrives. Unexpected obstacles appear. Allies help or fail. Enemies sharpen. Inner conflict doesn’t sit in the background as “mood”; it becomes a lever that either drives the character forward or freezes them at the worst possible moment.

The ideal ending feels like two things at once: surprising in the moment, inevitable in hindsight. That effect comes from discipline. You plant causes early, you escalate consequences honestly, and you make the character pay for the choices that define them.

The opposite pattern is common in drafts that never quite become books: long introductions where the protagonist is presented, then the mother, then the father, then siblings, then friends—each given a showcase scene of “typical behaviour.” The pages fill with movement, but the story does not move.

A plot event becomes something low-stakes and easily reversible, followed by more scenes that explain, comment, recap, or soothe—until the reader realises they’re being asked to wait for the story to begin.

Prologues often become the same trap: a philosophical monologue that promises depth but delivers no narrative pressure. Thought can be beautiful, but if it doesn’t attach to a problem in motion—if it doesn’t create consequence—it becomes wallpaper. Readers don’t turn pages for wallpaper.

The simplest strategy to prevent most plot problems is brutal and effective: know what the chase is, and cut to it. Identify the central problem your story is truly about, then shape scenes that pursue it. Don’t spend hundreds of pages explaining why you want to tell the story, why the characters are the way they are, or what happened long before page one. Use that material as scaffolding if you must—but put the actual story on the page. Write the sequence of changes. Write the cost. Write the decisions that lock the character into the next decision.

If you want readers to turn pages, give them a reason to read the next one.

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Can sex kill?

But what can it kill, when it leaves so much desire alive, skinned raw?

Giorgio had never been the “dear diary” type. And there it was, everything he could manage to write, even though ever since he was a teenager, he’d been obsessed with the stationery sold at the little shop in the town centre. He collected pens, pencil sharpeners, and rulers.

Shortly after his first two unsuccessful years at high school, he started collecting various things.

Drawing compasses.

Then pocket compasses.

And finally, in the middle of his twenties, he took up building miniature cranes and tractors. When he left his parents’ home, just before thirty, he made sure he had a room to sleep in and a studio where he could assemble his miniature construction sites.

But a diary, never.

He didn’t even write at school.

He often watched one of his closest friends draw manga during lessons, then Marco passed him the panels to make him laugh.

Even before graduation, many of his peers had already had sex. Giorgio, of course, hoped not to fall behind. He knew he would be late, but he never imagined he would waste so much time.

He never imagined his first time would be with a prostitute.

The truth is that girls don’t want me.

That thought landed on him in the same year some colleagues married, and his cartoonist friend became a father.

What’s his name?

Nami. She’s a girl, Giò.

Nice name. Why?

Nami is one of the main characters in One Piece.

Well, he didn’t know what that meant, but he guessed it had something to do with Mangas.

He hadn’t seen Marco since the last time they’d celebrated graduation at his place, without parents around. That was the evening when he—Giorgio—made a move on Giulia, whom he’d loved since middle school.

Giulia, though, had a soft spot for Marco.

He had brought them together some time earlier, after she’d confessed that she had a crush on his cartoonist friend.

It hadn’t gone well, in the end.

So, he’d promised himself he would never interfere in other people’s love stories again.

Why don’t you like her?

I don’t know, Giò. She’s not my type.

You’re lucky.

Why don’t you go out with her? How long have you known her?

That night, at the party, he’d confessed.

Wait—no, it definitely wasn’t the first time.

And with this, that makes five.

Five of what?

You tell me.

Tell you what?

Asking me to go out like a real couple.

Why, what’s wrong with that?

She hadn’t answered. When she used to get upset about something, she would shake her head and walk away; very often, with him, she’d change the subject of their conversation.

Giulia got married after Uni.

She lives far away now.

He loved her platonically for twelve years, five months, three days, and seventeen hours.

He met Claudia. That’s why.

Can sex kill?, he wrote, abandoning the notebook soon after on the living room table.

A slow agony, like when you cook meat at a low temperature all night. In the end, skin and muscle slip off the bones with a breath.

But he no longer knows what to write in his diary.

He needs a shower now: cold, hot, then cold again.

Then he makes dinner. It’s late, who cares?

And, also, it’s Netflix time.

Microwaved pasta, and a documentary about O.J. Simpson. He mutters that he’s guilty, obviously. He ditched the weapon before he got on the plane.

Another lucky one, he thinks.

He had everything. I’ve got nothing.

Evil people always get what they want.

He regrets it the moment the thought lands.

He needs another shower. Hot this time—he doesn’t want congestion after eating.

It all feels so… artificial, he thinks, drenched in millions of drops, eyes fixed on his bare feet.

He can’t shake the feeling of being dirty and wrong.

On the sofa, he texts Claudia.

He hates her now.

At first, she’d been a kind of rescue, a way to pull his attention off Giulia. You can’t keep loving someone who gets married. Claudia is still a free spirit, even if she’s dating one of his friends.

An ugly one. Foreign. Bald. A hooked nose.

Once, he fought with her about it.

Stay out of it!

But why him, and not me?

He makes me laugh. He’s tall. You’re too serious.

He’d come home, shaking his head all the way, thrown his keys onto the sofa, then masturbated while looking at a photo he’d secretly taken of her on a day she’d worn a skirt.

When the photo stopped working, he’d browse porn‑something‑dot‑com for actresses who resembled her. There was one. He’d saved the link for nights when he couldn’t stand the search.

After therapy, though, Giorgio had learned to ration porn. He’d attended a few sessions with a psychologist because he’d started having strange thoughts about women, but he never told his therapist the real magnitude of his internal dialogues. He only wanted to see if the therapist could figure it out without him having to admit it.

Claudia’s message: How come you’re still up?

Giorgio: Can’t switch my brain off. What are you up to?

They’d fought.

They’d made up.

Before she got with his ugly mate, they used to go out a lot, just as friends, obviously. Claudia was like that: she kept male friends around her. Most of them were Giorgio’s networks anyway. School friends and colleagues.

Giorgio works in a warehouse that assembles and performs mechanical processing for other companies. A monotonous job that, one day, brought him close to breaking.

Claudia’s message: I’m bored. Can’t sleep. If you’re texting at this hour, it means you’re having one of yours. Right?

He wants to ask her out, but he knows she won’t. Since she’s “taken”, she’s not allowed to go out with male friends alone.

Except for him—Giorgio—because his ugly mate trusts him.

Claudia is one of those people who are short-tempered. While dining, she’d ask him to cut her pizza because the knives don’t cut. Then, halfway through, she complains that they brought out the pizza cold and gets it knocked off the final bill.

Giorgio: I don’t want to talk about it.

Claudia: I’m the one who doesn’t want to listen.

She’s always had a bit of a nasty streak.

Giulia was different. She could scratch, sure, but only when you pushed her too far, and most of the time she scratched with silence. If he got something wrong or tried to kiss her, she’d vanish for months. Then she’d return with a story about another blond boy who’d dumped her.

Giorgio would console her, and after a while, instinct would make him try again; she’d get angry, and they wouldn’t speak for weeks.

With Claudia, it was the same, only sharper: she insulted him, crushing him under violent words. Since he started losing his hair, she calls him “the Baldy with the little tuft”—because all that’s left is a thin haze through which you can see his scalp.

And it isn’t just that.

His skin, his hands, when it’s hot, they turn oily. Red spots bloom across his back, which the dermatologist blamed on abnormal hormone activity. Meaning: treatment, pills, a dozen warnings, including side effects “on the sexual sphere.”

Giorgio never truly began it. Aside from an annoying cream, he didn’t take anything else.

The last thing he wanted was erectile problems.

What if it happened during his first time?

That was what he thought about.

He couldn’t. He wanted to be ready.

Often, he felt like fire. Often, he burned with desire, but there was never anyone there to share it.

Giorgio: Busy tomorrow?

Claudia: Don’t start. You know.

Giorgio: No, I don’t know. It’s just a question.

He steps out for air.

In a month, it’ll be his birthday: thirty-six.

No celebrations this time. Last year, Giorgio drank with colleagues from work, and Claudia was there too.

Bitch.

She’d mocked him in front of his teammates, saying Giorgio is still a virgin.

On New Year’s Eve, he’d made the wish—this would be the good year, the year he’d finally find someone.

Then October arrived with that mute cold that seems to come down from the Dolomites, from somewhere beyond the blocks of flats.

He leans on the balcony rail. Even out here, the cold needles him, makes him feel dirty again. Dirty for what he’s done—though he had no other choice.

I’m ugly.

Women don’t want me.

Now he’s even lost the ridiculous little tuft he’d been clinging to. He’s read that bald men, after a certain age, can be magnetic.

There’s hope.

But he knows Lady Luck won’t lift a finger for him.

Once, he did have a girl. Kind of. A friend of Claudia’s. They went out together as a group, and later he asked her out properly. At first, Gemma refused: after graduation, she was moving to Milan.

Milan? That’s close. I’ve got a car.

He asked Claudia to put in a good word.

Leave her alone. She’s not for you.

Giorgio snapped: Why? What’s so wrong with me?

In the end, Claudia relented.

Gemma agreed to see him: an actual date, as if it might be real. They ate fish in a nice local restaurant. He paid, held doors, and confessed (a confession he’d only ever made to Marco and a couple of colleagues) that his real passion was building scale models: construction sites, tractors, cranes.

Gemma put on a look of surprise, said she’d never heard anything like it.

They went out twice more. The last time, he took her hand. But because it was his first time being so intimate with a woman, he moved their arms too much, too eagerly, making it uncomfortable.

Outside her building, he kissed her—just a stamped peck—because she pulled back at once and slipped away, saying it was late and she needed to study.

An hour later, Claudia texted: Bro… what did you do? Gemma’s crying!

They never saw each other again.

That same day, he sent his friends only one message: I’m a loser.

Then he stopped thinking about it.

And the truth is, it’s strange to remember it now, years later.

Claudia’s message: Come on. What happened?

Giorgio starts to type the truth: I had sex with a…

Then he deletes it.

She’ll laugh at him.

He already has too many thoughts to tolerate her laughter, as well.

He goes into the studio.

Three desks line the walls end to end. A low central light clicks on automatically after a certain hour when the door opens.

Giorgio’s recently finished a new site, partly copied. On the edge of his town, a construction firm is building a luxury apartment complex; he already knows they’ll sell those flats at an outrageous price.

He bought his own place at a good price, without an agent. Forty thousand down, a twenty-year mortgage for the remaining hundred.

And that’s his whole life, really.

A perfectly built site—no audience.

Metal.

Miniature parts.

Each month, he keeps the best pieces, strips the rest, and starts again.

Now, he lifts the red crane vehicle, the largest he has ever built. Some of the parts came from a real site; a friend in construction trafficked them to him. One and a half metres tall, with an electric motor. It moves slowly, and when he places it on the floor, he can pretend it’s real.

Giorgio: Beer?

Claudia replies almost instantly: Where? Don’t tell me yours. I’m not coming.

Giorgio: You’re not sleeping anyway. What does it cost you? Leave whenever you want.

Claudia: No romance, though. I’m not in the mood for an argument.

You won’t get angry, Giorgio thinks, carrying the crane out into the living room.

He goes back to the line in his diary, whether sex can kill.

He sets the crane on the table next to the open notebook.

Before Claudia arrives, he writes one last sentence, answering his own question.

He closes the notebook.

After about twenty minutes, Claudia buzzes the intercom.

Giorgio presses the intercom button without a word, letting her through the front gate.

He has one last wish—really, the only one he’s had since he met her.

Tonight, he’ll tell her everything, imagining a conversation in his mind: Claudia, a few hours ago I had sex with a prostitute; at first, I hated it, then you emerge behind my eyes (Claudia), coz I have a photo of you with a short skirt hidden in my phone. Did I tell you that? No. Oh well, I had it since… when? I can’t remember, sorry.

And for a moment, it had felt like a dream, until it felt unfair. So now, Giorgio had to put things right. Do justice.

He’ll tell her he’s done with dreams, that he’s not going to have any more wishes.

As Giorgio forms the thought, she knocks.

A glance at the crane machine, thinking he doesn’t have any beers in the house.

But it’s not that relevant. Right?

Before opening the door and letting Claudia in, he hesitates. His hand, hanging in mid-air, comes down slowly—sweaty—onto the handle.

She’s getting impatient because he’s taking so long to let her in.

Claudia knocks again, saying he’s wasting her time.

Giorgio smiles with one side of his mouth.

Come in… this is my last wish.

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Every language has its tough ones: the words you recognise on the page but avoid in conversation because you’re not entirely sure what they’ll do to your mouth. English, with its love of stealing from Latin, Greek, German, French and the occasional innocent bystander, is particularly fond of this game.

These are not invented curiosities or fake “internet Latin”. They’re all real, dictionary-backed words, but they live in that funny corner of the vocabulary where even native speakers slow down, stare for a second, and think, Do I really want to try this out loud?

Here are ten of them, each with a short meaning and a way to say it without spraining your jaw.

1 · Sesquipedalian
Pronunciation: sess-kwih-puh-DAY-lee-un
A person who loves long words, or language that uses them.
“His sesquipedalian style made every memo sound like a lost page from a Roman senate speech.”

2 · Defenestration
Pronunciation: dee-fen-eh-STRAY-shun
The act of throwing someone or something out of a window. Yes, it’s specific.
“After one more ‘reply all’ to the entire staff, she contemplated the defenestration of her laptop.”

Ps. I will definitely use this one! Most likely the easiest one in here.

3 · Floccinaucinihilipilification
Pronunciation: flok-sih-naw-sih-nie-hil-ih-pil-ih-fih-KAY-shun
The act of judging something as worthless. The word itself is almost a joke about its own meaning.
“His casual floccinaucinihilipilification of her favourite book said more about him than about the novel.”

4 · Antediluvian
Pronunciation: an-tee-dih-LOO-vee-un
So old it might as well belong to the time before the biblical flood; extremely outdated.
“His views on relationships were so antediluvian they could have arrived by ark.”

5 · Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism
Pronunciation: soo-doh-SOO-doh-hy-po-par-a-THY-roid-izm
A rare medical condition with a name that looks like someone fell asleep on the keyboard. It’s related to a milder form of another, equally complex disorder.
“The consultant rolled the word pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism off her tongue with the practised calm of someone who had pronounced it a hundred times before.”

6 · Synecdoche
Pronunciation: si-NEK-duh-kee
A figure of speech where a part stands for the whole, or the whole for a part: “all hands on deck” for “all sailors”, for instance.
“The town was reduced to a synecdoche in his memory: one street, one café, one unanswered question.”

7 · Hagiography
Pronunciation: hag-ee-OG-ruh-fee
Originally, a saint’s biography; more broadly, any biography so flattering it skips the flaws.
“The authorised biography read like a hagiography, all light and no shadow.”

8 · Otorhinolaryngologist
Pronunciation: oh-toh-ry-no-lair-in-GOL-uh-jist
The technical term for an ear–nose–throat doctor (ENT). Three organs, one terrifying word.
“He left the clinic able to breathe again, but still unable to pronounce ‘otorhinolaryngologist’ without rehearsal.”

9 · Lachrymose
Pronunciation: LAK-ruh-mohss
Tearful, inclined to cry, or simply sad and weepy.
“The film was so shamelessly lachrymose that even the popcorn felt manipulated.”

10 · Weltanschauung
Pronunciation: VELT-ahn-shau-oong
A worldview, a way of seeing life, borrowed from German, is used in English when “point of view” feels too small.
“Travel had not changed his politics, but it had quietly rearranged his Weltanschauung.”

Why bother with words like these?

We don’t need any of these words to live a good life, but learning how to say them out loud gives you a small, secret pleasure: the sense that you’ve walked a little further into the library than most people do.

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There is an idea that returns like the tide: every seven years, love sheds its skin, and with it, the person we call a soulmate changes too.

The myth says this: there is not one single soul assigned to us forever, but a constellation of encounters. Some arrive to stay. Some arrive to teach. Some arrive to break the old version of us so a new one can breathe. In this vision, seven is a threshold—not a verdict, but a passage. A door between who we were and who we are becoming.

In modern spiritual language, this belief usually rests on three recurring images.

• First: multiple soulmates—more than one profound bond across one lifetime.

• Second: the seven-year cycle—a symbolic period of personal and relational transformation.

• Third: karmic connections—intense bonds that seem to return in different forms until a lesson is understood.

It gives people a grammar of fate when reality feels too complex to be held by one sentence. For many, saying this was a karmic relationship is not an escape from truth, it is a way to give pain a form and therefore survive it.

Even the soulmate idea carries an older echo in the Western imagination: the longing for recognition, for a bond that feels remembered rather than discovered, as if two lives had already met somewhere beneath language.

Then there is the earthly shadow of this story: the so-called seven-year itch.

Popular culture turned it into a rule, almost a prophecy. But the wiser reading is subtler.

Human relationships do pass through phases of stress and redefinition, yet not on one universal clock. Some bonds fracture early, some much later, some renew themselves more than once. The heart does not keep bureaucratic time.

So is the seven-year soulmate cycle a prophecy or a legend?

The point is not to prove that a new soulmate appears every seven years.
The point is to notice that we are not fixed beings, and that love, once it appears, must keep meeting us as we change.

Sometimes we do not lose a person.
Sometimes we lose only the version of ourselves that could love in that particular way.

Type “meet soulmate every 7 years” into a search bar, and you’ll find a familiar constellation of ideas: karmic cycles, emotional rebirth, and the sense that relationships arrive in chapters rather than in one eternal line. The claim is seductive because it offers a pattern where life often feels chaotic.

But is there any evidence behind the “every 7 years” idea?

Many people do feel that every few years they become psychologically “non-identical” to their former self: priorities shift, identity reorganises, old compromises become intolerable, and new values emerge.

The myth of “a new soulmate every seven years” may be less a demographic law and more a narrative shorthand for this internal evolution.

Psychology gives us a useful lens here: relationship beliefs.

Research distinguishes between “destiny beliefs” (partners are either meant to be or not) and “growth beliefs” (relationships are built and transformed through effort and adaptation).
That distinction matters because the same rupture can be interpreted in two radically different ways:

• Destiny frame: “This is the wrong person; the universe is rotating me toward the next soulmate.”

• Growth frame: “This is a hard phase; our bond needs redesign, not replacement.”

Neither frame is always right. But they produce different behaviours: persistence versus exit, negotiation versus symbolic closure.

This is where spiritual language and psychological language often overlap. When someone says, “That person came into my life to teach me something,” a clinician may hear meaning-making after loss; a spiritual thinker may hear karmic timing. Different maps, same human need: coherence.

The 7–7–7 rule is not about destiny, karma, or soul contracts. It is a practical dating habit: go on a date every 7 days, take a weekend away every 7 weeks (sometimes phrased as every 7 months), and plan a longer trip every 7 months or 7 years, depending on the version.

The soulmate-cycle idea is symbolic and spiritual. It speaks about destiny, karmic lessons, and emotional evolution over longer life phases. The 7-7-7 rule, by contrast, is a practical routine popularised in relationship media and social platforms.

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Personal Opinion

Some of us have moved through many relationships, and in each one we believed it was love. Not all of them, perhaps—but some, certainly.

There is a time to fall in love and court love, a time to enjoy its peak (they say around three years, because of chemistry), and then a time of decline, and a time of renewal.

I believe we meet different soulmates in one lifetime. Each one carries something that, over time, reunites within a single soul.

Have you ever noticed that your soulmate now holds something familiar that already lived in your past?

Along our growth and life path, we meet people who are there to give us something in that precise season, but they do not remain forever.

How many such people must arrive? That depends on your spiritual evolution. The more refined your spiritual evolution is, the longer you may have to wait.

It is a matter of resonance.

And often, people come together out of boredom or circumstance: they feel they have no other choice. They pair off and remain inside those boxes for a lifetime, unsatisfied.

Love is a derivative product of evolution, not a literal universal law—however much we hope it is. It belongs to the spiritual and philo-psychological progress of the human being. Many animals love too; their conception of love is different, but real (Eagles, for example, are generally pair-bonded for life, but like many species, they can re-pair after loss or failed breeding).

That is why we should walk slowly inside relationships, and never stay simply because otherwise we would not be able to bear loneliness.
In that sense, loneliness kills love.
And loneliness without awareness kills people.
Then the damage spreads onto a wider social stage.

One day, after ten years, I received a message from an old friend. She told me that, back in the year we were going out as friends, she later regretted not giving me a chance—and that she had kept thinking about me for years. We lost an opportunity.

I replied that yes, we should have explored that emerging feeling more honestly, and that now it was too late. She chose to remain in a toxic relationship rather than step into the clear opportunity life was offering her. Soon after I departed (as I said 10 years ago), they broke up, and betrayals and uncomfortable truths came to light.

Has this ever happened to you?

A second part may come later—unless this piece resonates with you and you ask for it sooner.
Substack is one of those places where people tell you that if you want to grow, you must engage with others. It sounds good in theory, but how many actually do that? If it were that simple, every post would always find new souls ready to comment or leave a like. The truth is that social media is far more complex than the “how-to” gurus want us to believe.

Note: If this post sparked your curiosity, I ask just one more small effort: subscribe/follow my channel. Choose whichever way you prefer. This will help me grow and keep writing interesting pieces.

Thank you, and good luck.

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I used to spend hours planning a story and still fail to answer the only question that matters: what is this really about?

I would outline, rewrite, delete, and start again. Or I would do the opposite—write fast, trust instinct, and hope meaning would emerge in revision. Sometimes it did. More often, I ended up with pages full of scenes and sentences, but no real centre.

The problem was never effort. It was narrative intelligence.

What changed my process was painfully simple: 5 Principles.

Five lines that define the structural truth of the story before style, before flourish, before technical decisions.

Situation.
Desire.
Conflict.
Change.
Result.

It sounds basic because it is basic. That is exactly why it works.

For a writer or screenwriter, these five principles are not the finished work. They are the spine of the finished work. They hold the emotional architecture in place while everything else evolves: voice, imagery, pacing, dialogue, scene design, tone.

So, when you move within your story, which is still in your head, analyse it using these five principles.

Situation asks for orientation: where are we, with whom, and in what world of forces and limits?

Desire gives vector: what does the protagonist want strongly enough to act?

Conflict creates pressure: what blocks that desire, externally and internally?

Change marks transformation: what turns, in action, perception, identity, or moral position?

Result delivers consequence: what is now irreversibly different from the opening state?

That final point matters most. A story is not a sequence of events; it is a sequence of meaningful changes.

This is why so many drafts feel “busy” but weak: they contain incidents without transformations. The same danger repeats, the same emotional beat repeats, the same rescue repeats, and the narrative mistakes escalation for depth. But if conflict does not alter value, it is confusion, not a story.

The five-line principles prevent this drift by forcing causality and consequence.

A strong way to test the method is to compress a famous film. If the five-line version still carries emotional logic, the story is structurally sound.

Take Finding Nemo:

Situation: Marlin, an overprotective clownfish, raises his son Nemo on the Great Barrier Reef after a traumatic loss.
Desire: Nemo wants autonomy; Marlin wants to keep Nemo safe at all costs.
Conflict: Nemo is captured by a diver, and Marlin must cross the ocean, confronting danger, uncertainty, and his own controlling fear.
Change: Through the journey, Marlin shifts from fear-based control to trust; Nemo, in parallel, proves courage and capability.
Result: Father and son reunite in a new relational balance—less possession, more trust; same love, transformed expression.

That is a full dramatic arc in five steps.

The details are richer in the film, of course, but the narrative engine is already there. The method does not shrink the story; it reveals the story.

The practical power of this approach appears in drafting and revision.

When drafting, the five principles stop you from drowning in options.
When revising, they expose false weight—pages that sound good but do no structural work.

A scene earns its place when it deepens at least one of the five principles. If it supports none of them, cut it, merge it, or rewrite it so it carries a narrative function. Beautiful prose is not exempt from this rule. In serious storytelling, elegance without the right trajectory is still excess.

This is not an argument for rigid formula.

You can write linearly or nonlinearly. You can fragment chronology, switch POV, hybridise genre, privilege silence over exposition, or build long reflective passages. None of that conflicts with the five-line spine.

Experimental form still needs a logic of transformation. Otherwise, experimentation becomes camouflage for indecision.

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Many writers fear structure because they confuse structure with standardisation. They are not the same thing.

Standardisation flattens voice.
Structure supports voice.

This also resolves a common screenwriting problem: scene inflation. When every scene tries to be memorable, pacing collapses. The five principles restore hierarchy. You know what each sequence must accomplish, what can be implied, and what must be shown. You write fewer decorative scenes and stronger consequential ones.

For novelists, the method protects against lyrical drift.

You know, I strongly believe that stories should be written all the way through, but I also think that charging in blindly doesn’t help much; it makes the reader tense and fatigued. Instead, we want to guide the reader through our story, so structure serves as a guide for us as writers and for them as readers.

In short: Style stops floating above the story and starts carrying it.

If you want to apply this immediately, do it with discipline:

Write your five lines in plain language, no performance.
Test each major scene against them.
Track the causal chain: desire → conflict → change → result.
Strengthen weak links before polishing prose.

Then expand: five steps to ten, ten to scene map, scene map to draft. Expansion should add depth, not alter core identity every ten pages.

The paradox is precise: the tighter the structural core, the wider your creative freedom.

Because once the narrative truth is fixed, you can push harder everywhere else—tone, rhythm, metaphor, silence, juxtaposition, even ambiguity—without losing the reader’s trust.

In the end, most writing problems that look technical are structural first.

Not: “How do I make this scene more cinematic?”
First: “What structural function does this scene perform?”

Not: “How do I make the dialogue sharper?”
First: “What change does this exchange produce?”

Not: “How do I make the ending emotional?”
First: “What has truly changed since the opening situation?”

Answer those with precision, and the emotional force of the work increases naturally.

If a project feels blurred right now, do not begin with style. Begin with the spine.

Five lines.
Situation, Desire, Conflict, Change, Result.

Then write the story all the way through.

Before we begin, I want to thank you for being here.

Every essay takes days of reflection and revision, and knowing you choose to spend a few minutes reading means more than you can imagine.

Each essay here starts as a quiet note in a notebook and grows into something I hope brings you clarity.

I’m glad you found your way here.

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There are books that refuse to be read, manuscripts that reappear after centuries of silence, folios that kill reputations and occasionally, if you believe the archivists who whisper these things, ruin the health of whoever touches them.

Literature has always carried a strong superstition under its skin, a belief that certain pages are more alive than the hands that wrote them.

Here are the twenty-five strangest, most unsettling episodes from the deep past of writing, where scholarship meets mythology and history refuses to behave.

26 — The Voynich Manuscript: the Book That Defies All Human Tongue

Found in 1912, written in an alphabet no one can decode, filled with drawings of plants that do not exist, and diagrams that resemble embryonic cosmologies.
AI models, cryptographers, and medievalists have all failed to break its script.
It sits in Yale’s Beinecke Library like a quiet dare.

27 — The Codex Gigas, or The Devil’s Bible

A single monk, condemned to death, supposedly vowed to write an entire Bible in one night.
The Codex Gigas — nearly a metre tall — contains texts impossible to produce in a single lifetime.
At its centre: a full-page portrait of the Devil.
Scholars confirm that the handwriting is from one person.

28 — The Book of Soyga and John Dee’s Obsession

An obscure magical text from the 1500s, filled with coded tables.
John Dee — mathematician and advisor to Queen Elizabeth — believed the book spoke with angels.
It vanished for 400 years, then resurfaced in two separate libraries on the same week.
The encoded tables were finally solved… by a modern computer.

29 — The Sibylline Books That Destroyed Themselves

Ancient prophetic books, sold to the Romans by a mysterious woman.
She burned two volumes before their eyes when they hesitated at her price.
Rome bought the final book at the original cost.
It was later lost in a fire, as if the Sibyl reclaimed her words.

30 — Sappho’s Poems Found Inside Mummy Masks

For centuries, Sappho survived only through fragments.
Modern archaeologists discovered lost poems hidden inside Egyptian mummy cartonnage, papyrus recycled to form funeral masks.
Poetry resurrected from the dead, literally.

31 — The Bleeding Book of Chiavenna

Stored in a small Italian convent, this medieval volume contains a crucifixion scene that reportedly “bled” reddish liquid during a 17th-century procession.
Chemical analysis later showed the pigment contained hematite — iron oxide — which can “weep” when exposed to humidity.
Science explaining miracle, miracle defying science.

32 — The Talmud That Survived Every Fire

Scholars tracked a single medieval Talmud that survived four European fires, each one destroying the building around it.
The parchment barely singed.
Not a line missing.

33 — Shakespeare’s Missing Folios

Eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays would have been lost forever if two friends hadn’t published the First Folio in 1623.
Yet several annotated folios vanished over time (purchased, stolen, or burned), leaving scholars with marginal notes that end abruptly, mid-sentence, as though interrupted.

34 — Dante Predicting Modern Cosmology

Dante placed the universe inside a set of concentric spheres turning around a central point of divine light.
In 2015, physicists discovered that Dante’s geometric structure mirrors certain models of curved spacetime.
A poet anticipating physics by seven centuries.

35 — Stoker and the Blood of the Future

When Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, he described blood transfusion protocols decades before they became common medical practice.
Some believe Stoker’s notes show familiarity with experiments only a handful of doctors knew at the time.

36 — The Manuscript That Returned from the Sea

A medieval Icelandic saga was lost in a shipwreck.
A century later, a matching manuscript surfaced in a private collection on the British coast, water-damaged in a pattern consistent with long submersion.
Its provenance remains impossible to trace.

37 — The Cursed Macbeth

Theatre companies avoid saying “Macbeth” inside a theatre, calling it “the Scottish Play.”
Several early productions ended with injuries and deaths, including the first performance after the Folio edition, when a prop dagger was replaced with a real one, killing an actor on stage.

38 — The Lost Suitcase of Hemingway

In 1922, Hemingway’s wife, Hadley, lost a suitcase filled with all his early manuscripts on a train.
They were never recovered.
Some scholars believe the suitcase was stolen as a collector’s item; others claim the manuscripts may still exist in a private vault.

39 — The Manuscript that Wrote Back

Medieval scribes occasionally added corrections in the margins.
One 14th-century manuscript includes a furious note:
“Let the hand that steals this book wither.”
The corresponding pages show signs of repeated theft attempts, burn marks, knife scratches, dampness, as if the curse invited trouble.

40 — The Hand that Drew Itself

An illuminated manuscript in Bologna depicts a hand emerging from a cloud, drawing the letters of the alphabet.
Beneath it, an anonymous scribe left a cryptic phrase:
“Scrivo ciò che mi scrive.”
I write what writes me.
A medieval echo of metafiction.

41 — The Monk Who Burned His Library to Save It

In 1307, a Cistercian monk in France burned half his monastery’s library because he believed the invading army would profane the texts.
Scholars later recovered fragments in the ashes, pages baked into ceramic hardness, illegible but indestructible.

42 — The Book That Killed Its Owners

A Renaissance herbal known as The Poisoner’s Manual contained recipes using belladonna, monkshood, and arsenic.
Three of its documented owners died under suspicious circumstances.
The fourth went blind.
The book now sits in a locked archive in Florence (Firenze).

43 — The Gospel Written in a Single Sitting

A 12th-century Irish gospel manuscript shows no corrections, no breaks, no variations in ink.
Palaeographers believe a single monk wrote it in a single continuous effort, an act bordering on the impossible.

44 — The Cave of a Thousand Texts

In 1900, a Daoist monk discovered a sealed cave in Dunhuang, China, containing over 40,000 scrolls, untouched for a millennium.
Some scrolls described astronomical events later confirmed by modern astrophysics.

45 — The Epic That Predicted Flood Myths Everywhere

The Epic of Gilgamesh includes a flood story almost identical to later Hebrew, Greek, and Persian myths.
Anthropologists still debate how the narrative spread so widely before written culture connected civilisations.

46 — The Manuscript that Changes Each Time It’s Read

A Venetian codex from the 16th century appears to “shift” marginal notes: ultraviolet analysis shows layers of endorsements written and rewritten by successive owners, sometimes erasing each other, sometimes coexisting like ghost handwriting.

47 — Automatic Writing and Yeats’s Wife

Georgie Hyde-Lees began producing automatic-writing sessions for W.B. Yeats on their honeymoon, filling hundreds of pages with symbols and prophecies.
Yeats used these texts to build A Vision.
Even now, scholars debate whether they were mysticism, psychology, or unconscious brilliance.

48 — The Monk Who Vanished from His Own Manuscript

A medieval chronicler began a detailed autobiography, then disappeared from the narrative mid-sentence.
His pupils finished the final chapters, writing simply:
“Master left.”
No record of him exists after that line.

49 — The Book of Sand

Borges invented a book with infinite pages, but mathematicians later linked its structure to real fractal texts, manuscripts copied recursively in monasteries, where margins contain smaller versions of the central text.
Infinity hidden in vellum.

50 — The Manuscript That Refuses Restoration

A 14th-century Persian astronomy treatise darkens every time conservators attempt to restore it.
Chemical analysis shows nothing unusual.
But each ultraviolet scan reveals the exact phrase written over and over in microscopic script:
“The stars do not wish to be corrected.”

First 25 Uncanny Literary Compendium Part

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Before we begin, I want to thank you for being here.

Every essay takes days of reflection and revision, and knowing you choose to spend a few minutes reading means more than you can imagine.

Each essay here starts as a quiet note in a notebook and grows into something I hope brings you clarity.

I’m glad you found your way here.

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The strangest, most improbable, fully-documented events from the world of writers, manuscripts, artists, poets, and forgotten books. A library of the unsettling and the unbelievable.

You discover, as you move slowly through the century’s pages, that writers often live in the very margins they describe. They make predictions without meaning to; they hear echoes of events they’ll never witness; sometimes their lives tilt toward the same shadows they cast in fiction. It’s as if certain pages insist on writing the writer in return.

Here are 25 moments — Italian, European, Latin American, Japanese — where literature crossed into the uncanny, the unlikely, the nearly impossible.

1 — Dante and the Woman He Saw Twice

Dante met Beatrice only twice in his life, yet she became the axis of the Divine Comedy, the guide through Paradise, and the embodiment of divine intellect.

Two meetings.

A millennium of influence.
Scholars still don’t understand how a momentary encounter became metaphysics.

2 — Emily Brontë and the Wind That Arrived on Cue

Emily Brontë wrote in her diary-paper of 1837 that the moors spoke to her “in voices only the storm understands.”
A week before her death, during the final hours when she refused medical help, a violent storm hit Haworth — the strongest of that winter — shaking the parsonage so fiercely that witnesses said it “felt like the house exhaled with her.”
Her last breath and the storm’s last roar coincided almost to the minute.
Local papers recorded the event with quiet astonishment.
Art and weather collapsing into the same gesture.

3 — Pirandello and the Palmist’s Prophecy

A fortune-teller in Palermo once told Pirandello he would marry “a woman of fire” and live “behind masks.”
Years later, he married Antonietta Portulano, whose jealousy and mental unravelling shaped his life and his theatre.
The prophecy became biography; biography became Six Characters in Search of an Author.

4 — Calvino’s Cities That Became Real

Decades after Le città invisibili, a group of MIT researchers used Calvino’s structure of imaginary cities as templates for real-world urban planning simulations.
A fictional architecture became a scientific tool.
Calvino dreamed, and the world built from it.

5 — Charles Dickens and the Train He Dreamed About

Months before Dickens survived the Staplehurst rail crash in 1865, he wrote to a friend describing a dream “so vivid” that he awoke believing he had been inside a mangled train carriage, helping strangers escape.
When the real accident struck, Dickens, who hated travel and rarely took trains, climbed out of his intact carriage and helped the wounded for hours, just as in the dream.
Afterwards, he claimed he could never shake the feeling that he had “met the future by mistake” in sleep.

6 — Oscar Wilde’s Tombstone Prediction

In The Critic as Artist, Wilde wrote the line:
“A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.”
Years later, a Paris sculptor created Wilde’s tomb effigy without ever having seen the author, relying only on descriptions.
The result is haunting: the face is unmistakably Wilde’s: gaunt, serene, and strangely prophetic of how he looked on his final day in the Hôtel d’Alsace, though Wilde died years before the sculptor ever began the monument.
Contemporaries whispered that Wilde had written his own epitaph long before marble ever met chisel.

7 — Pasolini Filming His Own Ghost

While shooting Accattone, Pasolini filmed a scene of a slow funeral procession moving through a ruined suburb.
Years later, the real funeral corteo for Pasolini passed through the same streets, almost frame by frame.
Cinema had rehearsed life.

8 — Elsa Morante’s Cat Omen

Friends swear that Morante used to stop writing the moment her cat vanished. She believed each disappearance predicted a death in a friend’s family.
Three times the belief proved true.
No one ever convinced her otherwise.

9 — Buzzati and the Waiting Soldier

In Il deserto dei Tartari, Buzzati imagined a soldier waiting for an enemy that never arrives.
Years later, on his deathbed, he told a friend the book had “predicted” his own long approach toward illness: a siege without a visible army.

10 — Sciascia’s Stories Solving Real Crimes

Sciascia’s novel Il giorno della civetta anticipated details of mafia structure that investigators confirmed only years later.
His fiction saw what the legal system refused to see.

11 — García Márquez and His Grandmother’s Visions

Márquez said he never invented his magic.
His grandmother’s stories (told with total seriousness) included ghosts, prophecies, and men who could live through bullets.
What we call magical realism was simply the family register.

ps I felt that. Always thought my grandma was responsible for my vast imagination.

12 — Borges and the Library That Became the Internet

In 1941, Borges described an infinite library of branching texts, coded nodes, and endless mirrors.
Decades before the invention of hypertext, he had sketched the internet’s nervous system.

13 — Nabokov Dreaming Lolita

In a notebook discovered after his death, Nabokov sketched a fragment of a story about an older man obsessed with a girl, twenty years before beginning Lolita.
A dream first, a scandal later.

14 — Virginia Woolf Hearing the Future

During the Great War, Woolf wrote about a society in which citizens would be surveilled “by invisible, electric means.”
A century later, it reads like a premonition of digital life: a whisper ahead of time.

15 — Dickens and the Stroke He Wrote First

The Mystery of Edwin Drood opens with a man suffering a seizure in a cathedral.
Dickens died of a stroke while writing the novel.
Life seized him at the very point he had described.

16 — Poe Foretelling a Real Shipwreck

In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, starving sailors eat a cabin boy named Richard Parker.
Forty-six years later, a real shipwreck ended with the same tragedy.
The victim’s name was also Richard Parker.

17 — Kafka Anticipating Bureaucratic Hell

Kafka’s visions of paperwork labyrinths, opaque authorities, and maddening delays were written before modern bureaucracy existed.
Then reality arrived… and looked exactly like him.

18 — Sylvia Plath’s Poem that Described Her End

Plath once wrote: “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”
Months later, she would fall into that silence for good.
The poem reads, unbearably, like a goodbye in rehearsal.

19 — Bulgakov and the Manuscript that Would Not Burn

In The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov wrote the famous line:
“Manuscripts don’t burn.”
After his death, hidden drafts of the novel resurfaced intact, as if proving him right.

20 — Mary Shelley and the Birth of Organ Transplants

While writing Frankenstein, Shelley imagined a doctor who could reconnect human tissues with surgical precision.
More than a century later, her descriptions matched early transplant science almost eerily.

21 — Dostoevsky’s Epileptic “Visions”

Dostoevsky described moments of exaltation before a seizure, a bliss “worth all of life.”
Modern neurology later confirmed that such states can occur in temporal-lobe epilepsy.
His art narrated his brain before medicine could.

22 — Tolstoy and the Train

Years before trains became symbols of industrial death, Tolstoy wrote about them with uncanny dread.
Then his own character Anna Karenina — and the aura around her — became inseparable from that prophecy of steel.

23 — Lorca’s Poem and His Fate

Federico García Lorca wrote of “a shadow shot by the dawn.”
Days before his execution, he told a friend he dreamed of being hunted in olive groves… exactly where his body disappeared.

24 — Kawabata and the Sound of the Suicide Snowfall

Yasunari Kawabata wrote an essay where snow “falls with the silence of death.”
His own suicide years later occurred on a night of heavy snowfall, in a house silent except for the settling ice.

25 — Haruki Murakami Predicting His Own Career

Before writing a single novel, Murakami suddenly stood up at a baseball game and thought: “I can write a book.”
He later described it as a “call from nowhere.”
He went home, wrote Hear the Wind Sing, and never looked back, as if someone had whispered the future to him.

50-Entry Uncanny Literary Compendium — PART II

Medieval Mysteries, Vanishing Manuscripts, and Cursed Books

Coming Next Week

(Excerpt from Lands of Solitude. Gebedia writes a farewell letter and hand-copies an old Italian poem)

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Before we begin, I want to thank you for being here.

Every essay takes days of reflection and revision, and knowing you choose to spend a few minutes reading means more than you can imagine.

Each essay…

Read more

Before we begin, I want to thank you for being here.

Every essay takes days of reflection and revision, and knowing you choose to spend a few minutes reading means more than you can imagine.

Each essay…

Read more

1st Scene

English

There it was—the photograph. On the back, Michele’d written: the rose.
A burn shaped like a flower, opening the skin from his shoulder up to the lobe of Riccardo's left ear.
Steam, he’d…

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Before we begin, I want to thank you for being here.

Every essay takes days of reflection and revision, and knowing you choose to spend a few minutes reading means more than you can imagine.

Each essay here starts as a quiet note in a notebook and grows into something I hope brings you clarity.

I’m glad you found your way here.

Subscribe now

Inspiration has always carried a kind of romantic prestige, as if it belonged to another realm entirely, a visitation more than a practice, a rare alignment of mood and mystery that you cannot summon at will.

Many of us grew up with that idea: the painter who waits for perfect light, the writer who lingers in cafés until a phrase appears, the musician who drifts until a melody arrives like a gift.

Anyone who lives long enough with a creative calling learns a quieter truth: inspiration does not come as an event; it turns up as a consequence.

Creative recovery is not an erratic performance but a daily meeting with the page, the instrument, or the bench, and the process asks for surrender rather than control.

If inspiration does not demand perfect circumstances, and if steady practice can build the conditions that invite it, the fear of “not being ready” loses its reality.

People delay because they believe they need unusual clarity or a charged mood before they can make something worth keeping, yet most honest work begins from an ordinary state.

You sit down not because you feel inspired, but because you hope inspiration will find you there.

Personally, I write every day.
Sometimes it’s a margin note on a worn sheet of paper, sometimes a line on my phone, the medium doesn’t matter.
Ideas flutter through my mind like frantic birds, and to catch them before they vanish, I have to pin them down in a note.
At times, I even use my phone’s voice recorder.

I never wait for inspiration.
I sit, and I write.
On my worst days, I craft a single sentence, erase it, rewrite it, and repeat the ritual until the rhythm returns.

It’s painfully hard to revisit old pages abandoned for too long.
You feel desolate, as dry as a desert, but it’s only a trick of the mind.

I never wait for inspiration.
Often, it’s already alive; I don’t need to chase it.
And when it hides, I know it’s simply the sun behind the clouds.
I can still feel it.
All I need is to reconnect, to warm the engine of my soul until it burns enough to spark the energy that restores the clear sky around me.

Inspiration grows where you keep a regular clearing. As you clear, more returns. The hands begin to prepare the mind to trust them.

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