Writing Techniques

This is where I put what I learn about the craft while I write Grunt Force. It’s a bucket: so far 22 videos, all from John, the fiction editor behind the Bookfox channel, boiled down to one set of notes and ordered from the smallest unit up, sentence to scene to the whole book, then revision. Where a technique has a published example, I name the book; where it fits the novel, there’s a line on how. The idea under all of it is that every unit, down to a single sentence, is a small story that decides where the reader leans in. Most sections end in a small demo, built on lines from the novel, so the idea gets tried before it gets filed.

Sentences

Let the last sentence pick the next

Sentences work like notes in music: before writing one, look at the one before it and decide whether to echo it or break from it. Vary length, but also structure (not every sentence subject, verb, object; open on a short word and a comma, or a “when” clause) and rhythm (a three-part sentence shouldn’t sit next to another one). Then build it on purpose: choose the verb instead of taking the first one, let one word lift the sentence above information (Janet Fitch calls it the power word, and it shouldn’t come from a thesaurus), give longer ones a small arc that pays off or twists at the end, and put the most important information last.

Make them wait

A delay sentence holds back its subject. Douglas Adams opens The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with four prepositional phrases before you learn what the sentence is about, a small yellow sun. The long sentence is the same trick at full size: grammatical and deliberate, never a run-on, and able to travel from a standoff to agreement inside one sentence, as one in Watership Down does.

Grunt Force try: Past the dog park, past the pool nobody swims in, past the forty-third white fence on Row Nine, sat the one container with its lights still on.

Two halves that turn

A contrast sentence calls the hard thing easy and the easy thing unbearable, as Tana French’s narrator does in In the Woods. A reversal sets something up and flips it by the end; Orwell’s “some animals are more equal than others” is the famous one, and reusing the same word for the flip makes it ring.

Grunt Force try: If the Sergeant had screamed at me, I’d have forgotten it by dinner, but I couldn’t forget him being kind.

Grunt Force try: Dignity through work was the first thing the work took.

Vary the length

Published writers go shorter than most of us and longer too. Cormac McCarthy keeps repeating “They rode on.” in Blood Meridian, set between sentences of 89 and 78 words. Short sentences have jobs: a punch straight after a long one, a catchphrase the book returns to (Vonnegut’s “So it goes”), a last line, a cluster of three or four that slows the reader down, or a funnel where each sentence in a paragraph is shorter than the last. His test: if nothing in your draft is under four words, add one. Paste a paragraph here to see its shape.

Grunt Force try: I checked my score. Then my assignments. Then I stopped checking.

Echoes on purpose

Repetition reads as sloppy when it’s accidental and clever when it’s chosen. Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi uses one word three times in a sentence. A pile-on keeps a word grammar doesn’t need, for rhythm. A building sentence starts each clause the same way (anaphora) and hands the last word of each clause to the next. When an accidental repeat turns up in revision, try making it stronger before reaching for a synonym; D. H. Lawrence’s revisions of The Rainbow doubled down on the repeated words.

Grunt Force try: Every shift earns a point. Every point earns a perk. Every perk buys a quiet night. Every quiet night costs a year.

Make a claim, then prove it

A list sentence states something short, then backs it with details, as David Benioff does in City of Thieves. Lists of three were writers’ before they were AI’s, so don’t give them up.

Grunt Force try: The base was a postcard: mowed by men who’d never own a lawn, painted by hands that used to build houses, watched over by a number nobody had seen.

Words to cut

Most of these are fine once and a habit by the tenth time, so they’re for a search in revision, never a rule while drafting. Hedges belong in dialogue, where people do hedge.

Two more habits: strings of three or four prepositional phrases, which he counts worse than adverbs, and adjectives that repeat their noun (forested woods, open fields). Here’s the table as a search over your own paragraph.

Description

Thisness

The term is James Wood’s: concrete detail that couldn’t belong to any other moment. Choose the unusual detail over the stock one (thorns in a man’s beard after he’s thrown into prickly pears, in Lonesome Dove). Keep some details off duty, there only to make the world believable. Go small, give the detail readers don’t expect, like the unopened Coke in The Road, and never explain it afterwards; he calls explaining the biggest mistake.

Through someone’s eyes

Description says as much about the describer as the described, so filter it through the viewpoint character’s mood: the same dawn reads differently to a happy man and a grieving one. Use more than sight (his challenge is four senses in one paragraph), describe a place now and then by what’s missing from it, and keep it illustrative rather than exhaustive: write the crowded paragraph, then keep the best two or three details. Pick a spot between Balzac’s ten pages and Chekhov’s single glint of broken glass, and stay there, so the second half of the book isn’t sparser than the first.

For Grunt Force: the same base should look different through each narrator. Andre sees guards and cameras, a believer sees the flowers, and nobody explains the details that should horrify.

Dialogue

Get the mechanics right first: a new paragraph for each speaker, tags that disappear, no adverbs on “said”. Then give each character a voice of their own; his test is a page of one line from each character with no tags, and a reader who can still tell who said what. Mix in indirect and summarized dialogue (keep 70 to 90 percent direct) to speed up dull talk, and let the important things go unsaid; “Hills Like White Elephants” never names what the couple is arguing about. So here’s his test, on three of my narrators.

Watch the beats. An action for every line clogs a scene, and none at all leaves voices floating. When two characters share a pronoun, put an action right before the line instead of a tag. And when someone has to deliver information, have them do something while they talk.

Scenes

Building one

His “octave” is eight steps: know what the character wants and what’s in the way, make the reader ask a question, raise the stakes (add someone vulnerable, threaten something personal, or take resources away), salt it with something fun even in dark material, move the plot, move the character, touch the theme if it fits, and end on a high point rather than where things wind down. Success should bring “yes, but” and failure “no, and”, where the “and” is how the character reacts.

Nancy Lamb’s checks

Her method adds the checks I’d tape to the monitor. Every scene needs a forwarding device: new information, a decision not yet acted on, or a new complication. Don’t solve a scene’s obstacle in the same scene. Remind the reader of the central conflict every chapter or so. Count the characters on stage and cut one.

For Grunt Force: an obstacle can open in Owen’s chapter and close in Kevin’s, which is how a mosaic stitches itself together.

Pace

Give a scene the space its interest earns, not the space its clock time takes. Alternate fast and slow, the way Saving Private Ryan follows the beach landing with typewriters writing to the families. Stretch a fast run like a rubber band, then release it with a calmer scene before it snaps. Long, loosely punctuated sentences read fast and short, choppy ones slow, unless they’re full of action; two or three dialogue-heavy chapters in a row drag; short chapters feel quick, so vary them on purpose.

What to leave out

“Show the wound, not the knife.” The aftermath of an event often matters more than the event, so consider keeping some things off the page: the backstory of the world (The Road never explains its apocalypse), graphic violence, even a climax, as No Country for Old Men does. First-person narrators leave out what incriminates them. And cut the connective tissue between scenes; nobody needs to watch the drive to Scranton.

For Grunt Force: this is the book’s whole method. The atrocity happens between chapters and the next morning is what’s on the page.

Characters and voice

Building a voice

Build a narrator unlike yourself from the inside, not from slang or “thee and thou”: their own metaphors drawn from their world, the subjects they only talk around, whether they hide in the passive (“the deadline was missed”), their filler words and the line they say most often, their syntax, their social position (low-status characters hedge, high-status ones won’t be interrupted), and period words used lightly rather than copied.

For Grunt Force: a voice sheet per narrator, built from these eight, with something measurable in each, so the rhythm meter can check them.

Point of view

The common slips in close point of view: showing the narrator’s own face (“a smile tugged at her lips”), drifting in psychic distance without meaning to, writing only what a camera would record, tagging thoughts with “she thought” or italics instead of letting the narration carry them, and filter words that put a pane of glass between reader and character. Sally Rooney’s Normal People alternates one viewpoint per chapter and never slips, the discipline a mosaic needs.

Introductions

Bring a character on mid-action, give them a line worth quoting, hint at their problem, describe the important features early and briefly, put them in a telling place, and start them at the opposite end of the arc they’ll travel. Don’t introduce four people in one paragraph, and skip the mirror. A character coming back after a long absence needs a quiet reminder.

For Grunt Force: each narrator returns after three other chapters and a time skip, so every return is a small reintroduction.

The shape of the book

Skipping time

From most to least explicit: date headers, a time marker in the first sentence (in about nine chapters out of ten), situational clues (decide on a trip, then arrive; get a wound, then it’s healed), summary, or no mention at all, which he calls the most dangerous. Size the break to the gap: a scene break for a day, a chapter for weeks, a part for years. Station Eleven skips a huge stretch with a list of what no longer exists.

The middle

The middle needs a new question, different from the opening’s; at least one small revelation per chapter; one memorable tentpole event per chapter; plots that rhyme with earlier ones at a different scale instead of new plotlines; and the pleasures the opening promised, kept going. Close each stretch by settling one question and opening the next.

Theme

A topic is a word and a theme is a sentence. It usually turns up three quarters of the way through the draft, and then you revise the opening to seed it. It can be a question rather than a conviction, and each character should stand in some relation to it, the antagonist against it. The ending should twist the theme, not restate it.

Worldbuilding

He’d rather call it world breaking: the story starts where the world goes wrong. Set a rule in a sentence, then have a character break it; turn a hierarchy over; reveal that a belief was a lie; and if a taboo is set up early, break it before the end.

For Grunt Force: the twist I want is the opposite. The belief holds, and the horror is that nobody breaks it.

Game structures

Games have formalized plot shapes a novel in any genre can borrow: a visible rise in status (Old Man’s War ranks its hero up from a grunt), a skill tree of new abilities, objects that unlock the next stage, challenges that get harder and more varied and open a door when beaten, quests with a stated task and a stated reward, a controller steering an avatar through an earpiece, and respawning: fail, reset, try again.

For Grunt Force: the base is the game, with the rules turned against the players. The Social Trust Score is a level nobody can see, assignments are quests with hidden rewards, and the one rule is that a Grunt is always a Grunt. The squad only levels up in the game they play together at night. Ending chapters on a status change, and denying it, could be the book’s rhythm.

What nobody teaches

Charm, interestingness, originality, connection with the world, depth of vision, energy and authority. Depth of vision is how differently the book sees people from everyone around you. Authority is decisive sentences, and he says an agent can hear its absence in a few lines.

Revision

“You can’t polish sandstone.” Cut before you polish: whole scenes first, then paragraphs, then words. Cut the least interesting section of the book, then the next weakest, moving anything essential elsewhere. Only then go hunting for the words to cut and the sentence shapes above.

The drill

Pick one technique per writing session, from any level. Write it once in the shape and once plain, keep whichever is better, and put the shortest sentence of the day through the meter. Or let the page pick.

Sources

Twenty-two videos from one channel, watched in October 2026. Everything above is my synthesis of his arguments, and the examples are the books he reads from; I haven’t checked his quotes against the novels or his figures (Matt Bell’s 800 cuts, the 70 to 90 percent direct dialogue, the “nine chapters out of ten”), some of which he admits are guesses. Where the auto-captions mangled an author’s name and context didn’t settle it, I left the example out. The practice lines are mine.