Many professional authors will tell you what they do.
This isn’t my default. Via Negativa shaped my way of life more deeply than Via Positiva. Instead, I’m going to talk about what I don’t do.
I don’t do genre conventions.
The book market has its genres, and every genre has its tropes. Readers and writers love talking about tropes. Everyone knows you must have all the right tropes in your stories, spun in your own unique way. Tropes make it easy to summarise and classify stories in a heartbeat.
I don’t do that.
Take No Gods, Only Daimons. If I were to describe it the conventional way, it is an arcanepunk alternate / secret history technothriller set in a War on Terror fought with demons (that are not necessarily all evil) and magic derived from two fantastic elements (both of which have their own specific applications and properties, and annihilate each other on contact) featuring a contractor who is one part soldier and one part assassin who is touched by an archangel of a world religion and pulled into the war behind the war and must team up with a cybernetically-enhanced former Tier One special operator and a mentally unstable femme fatale swordswoman-assassin to prevent a fallen angel of another religion from obliterating all Creation.
It’s ridiculously long, isn’t it? More to the point, many of these tropes do not normally belong in the same genre. A battle between divinities is usually seen in pure fantasy, but this story also employs futuristic technologies extrapolated from today’s technology. The use of resource-based magic is a staple in hard fantasy settings, but hard fantasy does not normally grapple with real-world questions of theology, ethics and existence and incorporate them into the characters and setting. Firearms are the default weapons in a pure thriller setting, magic is expected in a fantasy setting, but here the characters use guns and magic and powered armour and also find ways to make knives and axes and swords the default weapons under certain circumstances.
How did this happen?
I build stories from first principles. Tropes emerge organically from the story; they are not forced into the plot, and they are not the anchors of the story. I find that stories built around tropes risk being shallow, inconsistent, and treat cultures as costumes instead of lived reality. I, for one, would rather honour the source material that gave rise to my work.
Does this approach work? Well, No Gods, Only Daimons was nominated for the Dragon Awards in 2017. You can get it for $0.99 through the end of the month.
I don’t do light reading.
Many people want and love escapist fantasy. Countless authors serve that market. It is what they do best.
It is not what I am drawn to write.
My work stands in the lineage fo the greats: Robert E Howard, J R R Tolkien, Poul Anderson, Stephen Hunter, Dashiell Hammett, Gene Wolfe. At the surface level, they delivered compelling characters, plots, and stories. Look deeper and you will find timeless ideas: civilization versus barbarianism, eucatastrophe, duty, how a man faces his end, the rot that lies beneath the mask of polite society.
My own work follows in the same vein. I do obsess over research, characters, fight choreography, and all the other elements that go into a story. But they serve to express and explore ideas both timeless and transcendent. The reader who reads deeply and repeatedly would find much to think about.
Saga of the Swordbreaker is my entry-level series. It’s a science fantasy cultivation series written for Young Adults. It has a simple system that characters use to measure the relative power of humans and monsters. It has what you’d expect from the genre, and not. The ‘not’ that drives the work, including the moment the system breaks down entirely and fails to register the true monsters. Book 1, Dawn of the Broken Sword, is $0.99 until the end of the month.
I don’t do level-scaling fantasies.
LitRPG runs on this logic: numbers go up, and that is good.
I do not know what that feels like.
I have seen old masters effortlessly defeat younger, faster and stronger opponents by being brilliant at martial fundamentals and deception. I have learned how to execute a palm strike, a throw, an arm bar, a shoulder lock, a joint break and a standing neck break using the same technique.
LitRPG assumes numbers describe reality. I know they don’t. At best, stats approximate certain aspects of reality. Beyond their scope, the numbers hold no weight. My work strives to capture what hard boundaries cannot. Pure stats-driven stories, where the logic of levels rules all, are not for me
If you want to know how a single technique can generate so many applications, there is a scene in Saga of the Swordbreaker 4: Fist of Heaven and Earth, that shows just this.
I don’t do what is false.
A story is a lie.
The writer invents characters and plots. The reader engages with them as if they were true. Thus an outright lie becomes a kind of truth.
Every work of fiction I create is made up. But I do not write what I know is false.
I do not write that which is false to my experience. I do not write that which is false to my research. I do not write that which is false to what I have encountered of the ineffable.
This principle finds its highest expression in the Michael Chang Case Files. The Singaporean characters think, talk and act the way actual Singaporeans would. (With Michael Chang himself being the exception, and for very good reasons.) The Singaporean places named in the series exist: you can visit them in person. The martial arts Michael Chang uses are also real.
Beyond the tangible, my work speaks to higher principles. Other authors may write of the joys of exerting will over the world; I write of the consequences. Other authors may write about accumulating riches, status and power; I write about loss and cost. Other authors revel in indulgence; I write about restraint, austerity, asceticism, denial, discipline. Other authors may write of characters becoming more and more powerful while remaining the same person. I write about being stripped down to the marrow and remade anew. This I write, for this is what I know.
There’s a reason Michael Chang won’t tell you everything, and warns you not to follow him.
I don’t do AI-written prose.
There are two kinds of people: those focused on the product, and those focused on the process.
Product-focused authors tend to be the loudest advocates of AI in the writing space. AI maximises their output while minimizing their effort. I have seen authors boasting about how they used AI to write a book overnight, and the books sold well.
Process-driven authors focus on the human element of writing. They argue that AI cannot replicate what humans can do, and that something essential is lost when writing is outsourced to AI.
I will be pragmatic.
A Large Language Model is not embodied. I have found that it cannot grasp concepts like range, timing, deception, footwork, or the subtle principles of the internal martial arts.
An LLM has difficulty tracking large numbers of bodies moving through space and time. In other words, it has difficulty ensuring consistency when crafting or assessing complex scenes with multiple events occurring simultaneously.
AI is not sentient, let alone sapient. It does not understand what it is like to speak with the divine, to empty yourself and let the Spirit come rushing in, to achieve unity with the Beloved, to embrace the ordeal path and offer yourself to yourself. It could imitate the writing styles of those who have come before it. It cannot speak from the ground of true experience.
AI cannot create the prose I am drawn to write. So I must.
What I do
After taking away everything I do not do, what is left?
I write the liminal. I write what it means to be at the edges and the in-between spaces, to stand at the threshold, to be at the beginning and the ending of things.
I write the mythical. I write about the deep patterns that run through ages and cultures, to unearth the timeless wisdom held in stories eternal, and to apply them to the sacred and mundane.
I write the crucible. I write about the crises that reveal the shape of souls, that fires that forge the warrior, and how your choices make, change and unmake you.
Someday I may put a name to this approach. But the Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao. What name I hang on to it only gestures to what is beyond it. What I do is not a fungible consumable, but a catalyst.
If you want to know what I do, then the only way to do it right is to read what I write.
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