Blog: Craft Dissections

Andy Weir doesn't ease readers into Project Hail Mary with backstory or world-building throat-clearing, he opens on a man who doesn't know his own name, and then makes that ignorance do structural work for 470 pages. Here's what novelists can take from that approach and apply to their own drafts.

Leigh Bardugo's heist novel solves one of fiction's hardest problems: keeping six distinct characters alive on the page without losing the plot's momentum. Here's what that solution looks like at the sentence and structure level.