There’s a feeling every writer knows but rarely names.

You’re working on a subplot. It’s doing Important Things—delivering information, positioning characters, enabling the scene you actually want to write. You’ve justified its existence. You’ve revised it three times. And still, every time you sit down to work on it, your hands slow. The prose comes out wooden. You find yourself checking email, refilling your coffee, doing anything except pushing through the next paragraph.

Something is wrong. You can’t articulate what.

I spent two weeks in this exact state recently. A subplot in my current manuscript was doing three jobs at once: revealing a secondary character’s divided loyalties, giving my protagonist critical intelligence before a major scene, and providing him resources to participate meaningfully in what came next. On paper, it was essential. Every thread it touched depended on it.

I kept rewriting it. Adjusting the pacing. Adding justification. Cutting justification. Moving it earlier, then later, then back. Nothing helped. The subplot sat in my manuscript like a foreign object—technically present, mechanically functional, and utterly lifeless.

The Diagnostic

Here’s what I eventually understood: the subplot was contrivance, not character.

The distinction matters.

Contrivance serves plot mechanics. It exists because you need X to happen before Y can happen. The character does something because you, the author, require them to do it. The sequence of events is logical. It might even be clever. But it doesn’t emerge from who these people are or what they actually want—it emerges from your outline.

Character-driven plot is different. Things happen because of who people are, what they want, and how they’d realistically pursue it. The sequence of events might be messier. It might not hit your structural beats as cleanly. But it breathes. Readers can feel the difference even if they can’t name it.

The test isn’t “is this subplot necessary?” The test is: does this feel like something these people would do, or something I’m making them do?

My subplot failed that test. The mechanics were sound. The character motivations were thin. I was pushing pieces around a board instead of following people through their lives.

The Relief

So I cut it.

Not trimmed. Not revised. Cut. Deleted the scenes, removed the thread, accepted that three jobs now had no home.

And here’s the thing about cutting something that isn’t working: when it’s the right call, you feel it immediately. Not loss. Relief. The story started moving again. The energy that had been trapped in that dead subplot flooded back into the manuscript.

What Emerged

The scene I needed to write was simple: my captain summoning his second lieutenant to brief him before a critical social engagement. The failed subplot had been loading this moment with external mechanics—information drops, resource transfers, loyalty tests. All the weight was in what got exchanged.

When I stripped that away, the weight shifted to who was in the room.

The lieutenant who enters isn’t delivering plot information. He’s a man whose uniform is always immaculate—not from vanity, but from a lifetime of being watched and measured and found wanting by standards most men would never comprehend. He wears his perfection like armor. Each crease and button a declaration: I do not soften. I do not yield.

The captain isn’t receiving a briefing. He’s bracing for judgment. His lieutenant is clever enough, observant enough—if anyone on this ship could see the cracks, it’s him. The captain holds the silence and waits for the blade.

The blade doesn’t come.

Instead, the lieutenant pivots. Becomes genuinely useful. Offers expertise freely, without positioning for advantage, because someone finally stopped treating him as a threat. And the captain feels something loosen in his chest—not trust, not quite, but the specific relief of a man who had braced for a blow that didn’t land.

Then the First Lieutenant arrives. The old one. The loyal one. And he reads the situation instantly:

“You’re taking Gore.” Not a question. Not an accusation. Just the flat recognition of a man watching his captain choose a weapon he couldn’t provide.

The scene ends with two weights in the captain’s chest instead of one. He made the right choice. He knows that. It doesn’t feel like the right choice. It feels like a small betrayal dressed in tactical logic.

None of this was in my outline. None of it could have emerged from the contrived subplot I’d been protecting. It happened because I stopped asking “what does the plot need?” and started asking “what would these people actually do in this room?”

The information still got delivered. The relationships still advanced. But now they advanced through character truth instead of mechanical necessity.

The Principle

Kill-your-darlings advice assumes you’re cutting something beloved. Something precious you’ve grown too attached to see clearly. That’s real, and it happens.

But this is different. When cutting feels like relief—when the story suddenly breathes again—you weren’t killing a darling. You were removing an obstruction you’d mistaken for load-bearing structure.

Not everything that feels essential is essential. Sometimes what feels essential is just complicated. You’ve invested so much work justifying its existence that you’ve convinced yourself the justification is the same as necessity.

It isn’t.

Recognition

The story knows when you’re forcing it. That wooden feeling, that resistance, that sense of pushing uphill—these aren’t signs you need to work harder. They’re diagnostic. Something in the machinery is binding.

When progress feels like negotiation with your own plot—when you’re constantly justifying why something has to happen instead of simply watching it happen—check what you’re protecting. Ask whether it’s earning its place through character truth or through mechanical necessity.

The former will carry the weight. The latter will make you check your email twenty-five times an hour…

Something that helped my manuscript work flow again after weeks of stagnation, delivered with brevity. Hope this helps. Subscribe for Tuesday posts.

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Fair winds,
—D. S. Black

Function vs. Haunting

There’s a distinction I use when building characters that separates the ones who function from the ones who haunt.

What they want is the surface. The conscious goal. The thing they’d tell you if you asked. Promotion. Survival. Revenge. Love. It’s legible, articulable, and usually drives the plot.

What they’re looking for is beneath. The need they can’t name—often invisible even to themselves. It’s not what they’re chasing. It’s what would still be missing if they caught it.

The protagonist of my novel The Reply wants to survive. Wants to maintain command of his ship. Wants recognition from an Admiralty that despises his peculiar gifts. These are his goals. They drive his actions. A lesser version of the character could run on these wants alone and be functional—he’d have clear motivation, generate conflict, pursue objectives.

But Somerset is looking for something else. Something he’d never say aloud because he doesn’t have language for it.

He’s looking to be claimed.

Not used. Not needed. Claimed—by something vast enough to see him fully and want him anyway. The sea that hunts him. The officer who mirrors him. The divine attention that might destroy him but would at least know him first.

That’s why the plot can resolve and the character can’t. You can give Somerset everything he wants—command, recognition, survival—and he’d still be looking. The want is achievable. What he’s looking for is a hole in the shape of God.

This distinction is the difference between characters you remember a week after finishing the book and characters who take up permanent residence in your mind. Function versus haunt.

Most contemporary fiction has forgotten the difference.

Characters want things. Clear things. The plot provides obstacles. The climax resolves the wanting. Everyone goes home. The problem is that these characters only exist on the surface—because their creators do too.

You can’t write the looking-for if you’ve never asked yourself what you’re looking for. And that question requires a kind of interiority that’s becoming increasingly rare.

The Flattening

You can’t write what you can’t access in yourself.

This isn’t mysticism. It’s craft prerequisite. The looking-for—that unnameable need beneath the conscious want—has to come from somewhere. You can’t invent it from nothing. You recognize it. You find it in yourself first, then give it to the character.

Which means the craft failure has a source: writers who’ve never asked themselves the question.

Not won’t. Can’t.

There’s a term from psychology: interoception. The awareness of internal states. Hunger, heartbeat, the texture of your own unease. The capacity to notice what’s happening inside you before you name it, before you explain it, before you translate it into language someone else can understand.

This capacity can be developed. It can also atrophy.

A culture that can't sit still, can't be alone, can't tolerate ten minutes without stimulus, produces people with diminished access to their own interiors. If you've never been quiet enough to notice the difference between what you want and what you're looking for, you can't write characters who carry that distinction. You'll write the surface. Legible wants. Achievable goals. Flat.

I grew up with European parents in America. Spanish, German and Polish. High-context communication, where what matters lives in subtext, in implication, in what remains unsaid. I learned early what it costs when the culture around you can't hear silence. Everything must be stated. Subtext is "unclear." Implication is "poor communication." You're forced to translate yourself into explicit language—and something dies in the translation.

American communication has become pathologically low-context. This isn’t an accent or a dialect. It’s a flattening of the entire register in which complex interiority can be expressed. Characters in American fiction explain their feelings. They announce their motivations. They narrate their growth. They do this because their writers do this—because the culture has forgotten that anything can be communicated without being said aloud.

The result is fiction that functions like a workplace email. Everything important is stated. Nothing is left for the reader to feel into. The text doesn’t trust you, because the writer has forgotten that trust is possible.

This is the disease. The craft failure is a symptom.

Writers who’ve lost access to their own depths produce characters who don’t have depths to access. The looking-for requires interiority. Interiority requires silence. And silence has become intolerable.

The Marvel Problem

Let me be specific about what flat characterization looks like at scale.

Marvel villains want things. Clear things. Legible things. Thanos wants to erase half the universe. Killmonger wants to arm oppressed people worldwide. Hela wants to rule Asgard. The goals are stated explicitly, often in monologue. The heroes oppose them. The conflict resolves through combat. Everyone goes home.

This isn’t bad storytelling. It’s functional storytelling. It generates conflict, sustains a plot, delivers spectacle. The machine works.

But ask a different question: what are these villains looking for?

Not what they want. What need would still be unmet if they got everything they’re chasing?

The answer, in most cases, is that the question doesn’t apply. There’s no beneath. Thanos wants the snap. That’s it. He’s not looking for anything underneath the goal—no unnamed wound, no inarticulable absence, no hole shaped like answer. He’s a function dressed as a character. A plot obstacle with aesthetic flair.

The most Marvel can manage is making villains sympathetic. Killmonger has a sad backstory. Thanos believes he’s righteous. The films work hard to make you understand why they want what they want. This is mistaken for depth.

It isn’t. Understanding someone’s motivation isn’t the same as complexity. A character with a legible backstory explaining a legible goal is still flat—just flat with context. Sympathy is not interiority. Explanation is not the looking-for.

Compare Hannibal Lecter.

Hannibal wants things—escape, fine dining, freedom from tedious people. But he’s looking for something else entirely: a mind capable of meeting his. Clarice doesn’t just oppose him or help him. She sees him. That’s why he’s obsessed with her. That’s why the relationship is the engine of everything. You can’t resolve that by catching him. You can’t defeat recognition.

Or consider Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. He wants oil, money, victory over his competitors. He gets all of it. The film ends with him alone in a mansion, having achieved everything he ever chased, and he’s more hollow than when he started. Because what he was looking for—connection he couldn’t admit he needed, a son who’d see him as human, some evidence that his existence mattered beyond accumulation—was never available through the goals he pursued. The want and the looking-for were pointing in opposite directions. That’s why the film is a tragedy and not a success story.

Marvel doesn’t make tragedies. It makes conflict-resolution machines. Efficient, satisfying, forgettable.

The audience gets what it’s trained to expect: problems with solutions. Wants that can be thwarted. Villains who function as obstacles and then stop functioning when the obstacle is removed.

This is what flat characterization looks like when it has a billion-dollar budget. The spectacle distracts from the absence. But the absence is still there—that hollow space where the looking-for should be. You feel it in how quickly the films evaporate from memory. You saw it, you enjoyed it, you couldn’t tell me what Malekith wanted if your life depended on it.

Characters built only from wants are disposable. The looking-for is what makes them permanent.

You Write What You Can Embody

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you can only write what you can access in yourself.

Not what you’ve done—what you can feel the shape of. What you can find a path toward, even if you’ve never walked it. The interiority has to exist in you before you can loan it to a character. You can’t fake depth. You can only recognize it.

I write men of violence because I've held violence in my hands. Not theoretically. Not from research. I've made choices in rooms where the wrong word meant consequences I'd have to live inside forever. I've been the calm one when calm was the only thing between a friend and something I can't name here.

My characters are contained because I am contained—and containment is not absence. The people who’ve called me cold, robotic, “Spock” (I’ll take this one as a compliment) , have never seen what I’m holding. They see the stillness and assume the stillness is all there is. They mistake the lid for an empty vessel.

Meanwhile, inside: a furnace. Spiraling. Emotions so strong they’d be illegible if I let them out unfiltered. So I don’t. I learned early that the world isn’t equipped to receive what I actually am. You adapt or you break. I adapted.

My characters know this. Somerset performs control while drowning. Origen processes trauma through millennia of pattern recognition because feeling it directly would annihilate him. Fressange aestheticizes war because beauty is the only container that can hold what he's seen. They're not me. But I didn't invent their psychologies. I recognized them. They were already in me, waiting for names.

This is what I mean by access. Not autobiography. Resonance. The ability to feel the shape of an experience from the inside, even if the details differ.

I can write a man who loves his ship like a body because I know what it is to love something that can’t love you back. I can write cosmic horror because the numinous invades my quietest moments uninvited—the vertigo of deep time, the terror of a universe that owes me nothing and will continue without me. I can write the ache of men built for wars that never came because I know what it is to carry capacity that has no outlet. To be made for demands that never arrive.

If you’ve never been quiet enough to hear what you’re actually looking for—beneath the goals, beneath the plans, beneath the story you tell yourself about your own wanting—you can’t write characters who carry that weight. You’ll write wants. Legible, achievable, flat.

The question isn’t whether you’ve suffered enough to write deep characters. Suffering doesn’t automatically produce interiority. Plenty of people suffer and learn nothing about themselves.

The question is whether you’ve sat with yourself. Whether you’ve tolerated the silence long enough to notice the difference between what you say you want and what you’re actually looking for. Whether you’ve felt the shape of your own unnamed needs without rushing to name them, fix them, medicate them, scroll them into oblivion.

Most people would rather do anything than sit in that room.

And so they write characters who’ve never been in that room either. Flat people producing flat people, all the way down.

The Practice

This isn’t mysticism. It’s craft prerequisite. And like any craft prerequisite, it can be practiced.

The exercise is simple. The execution is not.

Sit with a character. Not their plot function. Not their role in the story. Them. Ask what they want. Write it down. Be specific—not “happiness” but the actual thing they’d reach for. Promotion. Revenge. The woman in the blue dress. The ship with their name on the commission.

Then ask: what would still be missing if they got it?

That’s the looking-for. The thing they can’t name. The ache that won’t resolve even if every conscious goal is achieved.

Somerset gets command. Gets recognition. Gets everything he says he wants. And he'd still be looking. Because what he's looking for is being claimed by something that sees him—and institutional success can't provide that. Only the sea can. Only Daud can. The want is achievable. The looking-for requires something that can't be pursued, only encountered.

If you do this exercise and come up empty—if the character only has wants, no looking-for—you’ve diagnosed the problem. The character is flat. Not because you made a craft error, but because you reached into yourself for the deeper layer and found nothing to draw from.

Which means the practice isn’t really about characters. It’s about you.

When did you last sit in silence long enough to notice what you’re looking for? Not what you want—what you’re looking for. The need beneath the goal. The ache that wouldn’t resolve even if you got everything you’re chasing.

If you can’t answer, your characters can’t either.

The practice is simple: stop. Be quiet. Be alone. Notice what arises when there’s nothing to react to, nothing to consume, nothing to distract. The discomfort that emerges isn’t the enemy. It’s the material.

Most writers would rather read another craft book. Watch another video essay. Collect another technique. Anything but sit in the room with themselves and notice what’s actually there.

I’m not telling you to suffer. I’m not telling you to excavate trauma. I’m telling you to pay attention. To develop the capacity to feel the texture of your own wanting without immediately naming it, fixing it, optimizing it into a goal.

The looking-for lives in the space before language. You have to be willing to stay there long enough to feel its shape.

That’s the practice. There’s no shortcut.

The Death of Nuance Is a Choice

So. Flat characters come from flat people.

Not stupid people. Not untalented people. People who’ve lost access to their own depths—or never developed it—because the culture they swim in doesn’t require it and actively discourages it.

You can get by without interiority. You can publish, produce, profit. The market doesn’t demand complexity. It barely tolerates it! Audiences trained on conflict-resolution machines will accept conflict-resolution machines. The feedback loop closes. Everyone gets what they expect. Nothing haunts anyone.

But the work that lasts—the characters that take up permanent residence in the mind—comes from writers who’ve done the harder thing. Who’ve sat in silence. Who’ve asked themselves what they’re looking for and stayed with the discomfort of not knowing.

I write men who were made for worlds that demanded everything because I understand the particular grief of being made for demands that never come. The soul built for storm, landlocked. The capacity for valor with no war to spend it on.The modern world didn't eliminate the capacity. It eliminated the demand. And capacity without demand becomes a kind of rot.

I languish in the demi-solde of modernity—half-pay, half-life, waiting for orders that won’t arrive from institutions that no longer remember what they’re for. I suspect I'm not the only one. The reenactors know. The wargamers know. Anyone who's ever felt overbuilt for the life they're living knows.

That’s not a complaint (although permit me some.) It’s material.

The ache of wanting to be tested and never being tested. The grief of carrying capacity that rusts from disuse. The looking-for that can’t be satisfied by comfort, safety, the padded corners of a world designed to demand nothing of anyone.

Most writers have never examined this in themselves because it’s not comfortable. It doesn’t fit the therapeutic model where all desires are processed toward resolution. Some desires don’t resolve. Some needs can’t be met by the world as it is. Sitting with that—without numbing it, naming it into submission, or scrolling it into background noise—is the work.

If you’ve never felt the shape of that, you can’t write characters who carry it. You’ll write people who want things. Achievable things. Legible things. Things that can be obtained and then the story ends.

You won’t write the ache.

The best fiction isn’t written by people who’ve suffered most. It’s written by people who’ve stayed in the room with whatever they carry. Who’ve refused the easy exit. Who’ve let the silence get loud enough to hear what’s underneath.

The death of nuance isn’t inevitable. It’s a choice—made daily, by writers who won’t sit still, by audiences who won’t tolerate ambiguity, by a culture that’s forgotten that some things can only be communicated in silence.

You can choose differently.

But you have to be willing to stay in the room.

I write because there’s nowhere else for what I am to go. The capacity built for storms, spent on sentences. The valor that would have been spent on battlefields, transmuted into characters who get to live in worlds that still demand everything.

It’s not enough. It’s never enough.

But it’s the only legitimate outlet I’ve found.

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Fair winds,
D. S. B.

Everyone thinks they’re empathetic.

Ask a writer if they understand people different from themselves and they’ll say yes. Of course. That’s the job. They’ll tell you they care about perspectives outside their own, that they believe in nuance, that they reject simple binaries of good and evil.

They’re usually lying. Not deliberately—they believe it. But performed empathy is a shield, not a practice.

Here’s what I mean: claiming you understand people who think differently costs nothing. It’s an identity badge, a way to signal sophistication without doing the actual work. You can call yourself radically empathetic while never once inhabiting a worldview that genuinely threatens your own.

The tell is always in the writing.

If your antagonist exists only to be wrong—to be defeated, to confirm the reader’s existing moral universe—you haven’t written a character. You’ve written a scarecrow. A thing shaped like a person, stuffed with everything you despise, propped up so your protagonist can knock it down.

Scarecrows don’t reveal anything about the villain. They reveal the author. They say: I don’t understand people who disagree with me. I’ve never tried. I don’t intend to start.

The Method Acting Frame

Stanislavski’s “magic if” is usually taught to actors. It belongs to writers.

The technique is simple: you don’t observe the character from outside. You don’t describe what they do and assign reasons for it. You ask yourself a different question. If I were this person, with this history, in this situation, what would I do?

Not what would a villain do. What would I do, if I had lived their life.

This is the difference between watching a character and inhabiting one. Most writers watch. They describe behavior, assign motivations, move figures through plot like chess pieces. The character does cruel things because the story needs cruelty. The character wants power because wanting power is what antagonists do. It’s all external. Mechanical. You can see the author’s hand on every lever.

Method writing requires you to disappear into the logic. To find the internal coherence that makes choices feel inevitable from inside the skull. Not justified. Not excused. Inevitable. The character couldn’t have done otherwise, because this is who they are, and you know that because you’ve been them.

This is uncomfortable. It means genuinely understanding why someone would do things you find repugnant. You have to find the version of yourself that could make that choice. The version that exists under different pressures, different wounds, different circumstances.

When I write institutional antagonists, I can’t make them stupid. I can’t make them cartoonishly corrupt. I have to ask: why would I stay loyal to a system I knew was broken? And the answer is always human. Because I built my identity inside it. Because leaving would mean admitting my life was wasted. Because the structure gives me purpose and status I couldn’t find elsewhere. Because I’m afraid of who I am without it.

That’s not villainy. That’s me, under different pressure.

Most writing stays shallow because this work is genuinely hard. It requires psychological risk from the author. You have to touch the parts of yourself that could become the thing you fear. And most people would rather write scarecrows than look that closely.

The Psychology Gap

Most writers don’t have a functional model of why people do things.

They work from types. Surface behavior. Tropes inherited from other fiction. Their villains are cruel because villains are cruel. Their heroes are brave because heroes are brave. The psychology goes exactly one layer deep, which is to say it doesn’t go anywhere at all.

I came to writing through intelligence analysis. Specifically, the part of the job that requires you to model how people think, what they want, and what they’ll do next. You learn fast that humans don’t operate on logic. They operate on attachment, on shame, on wounds they’ve never examined. You learn that the difference between instrumental aggression and hostile aggression changes everything about how someone behaves. You learn that shame drives more destruction than guilt ever could, because guilt says I did something bad and shame says I am bad. Guilt can be repaired. Shame has to be defended.

This isn’t purely academic. It’s craft. When you understand attachment theory, you understand why your character clings to someone who hurts them. When you understand defense mechanisms, you can write denial that feels lived-in rather than convenient for the plot. When you understand narcissistic wounding, you can write a villain whose cruelty makes sense. Not excusable. Sense.

Without psychology, characters are assembled from parts. The brooding loner. The power-hungry tyrant. The cold manipulator. You’ve seen these figures a thousand times because writers keep grabbing the same pieces off the shelf and stitching them together. The result is a character that functions, technically, but never surprises. Never feels like a person who exists beyond the page.

With psychology, characters become inevitable. The reader can trace the forces that made them. They recoil from the outcome but they understand the machinery. They can’t dismiss the villain as simply evil, because they’ve seen the path. They know, in some uncomfortable way, that the path was walkable. That anyone could have walked it, given the right wounds and the wrong circumstances.

The gap shows most clearly in antagonists. A psychologically literate writer can articulate why their villain believes they’re correct. An illiterate one just makes them cruel and calls it characterization.

Why This Is Hard or: The Ego Problem

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most writers only create characters they’d want to be friends with.

Protagonists get the author’s best qualities, or the qualities the author wishes they had. They’re brave when it counts. Kind beneath the rough exterior. Misunderstood but ultimately good. The protagonist is a wish-fulfillment proxy, the author’s idealized self moving through a world that will eventually recognize their worth.

Antagonists get the opposite treatment. They become receptacles. Everything the author fears, despises, or refuses to examine in themselves gets poured into the villain. The result is a figure that exists only to be Other. Easy to hate. Morally uncomplicated. Safely distant from anything the author might have to own.

This is projection wearing a plot.

The problem isn’t that it’s lazy, though it is. The problem is what it reveals. When your villain is cardboard, you’re telling the reader something about yourself. You’re saying: I have never genuinely inhabited a worldview I find threatening. I’ve never asked what it would take to make me into someone I despise. I don’t understand people who disagree with me, and I’ve decided that’s their failure, not mine.

That’s not characterization. That’s a defense mechanism with a narrative structure.

The ego wants safety. It wants to write heroes who validate your self-image and villains who confirm your moral superiority. It resists the method acting work because that work is threatening. You have to admit the villain is in you somewhere. You have to find the seed and water it enough to watch it grow. Most people would rather not know what flowers.

So they write scarecrows instead. And they tell themselves it’s craft.

The Formula Problem or: Where Shallow Writing Comes From

This is where formula fantasy fails hardest.

You know the shape. The Dark Lord wants power because wanting power is what Dark Lords do. The villain is cruel because cruelty is villainy and villainy requires cruelty. There’s no interiority. No sense that this person believes in what they’re doing. No coherent psychology beneath the armor and the speeches about domination.

The villain exists because the structure requires a villain. That’s it. That’s the whole explanation.

I won’t name specific books, but you already know the ones I mean. The villains who monologue about darkness and power as though those are motivations rather than aesthetics. The antagonists who do evil things for evil reasons, tautologically, because the author never stopped to ask what a real person would want in that position. You’ve read these books. You might have loved them when you were young enough not to notice the scaffolding.

The result reads like fiction written by someone who has never met a human being with genuinely different values. Not someone wrong, but someone who arrived at their conclusions through a coherent process you could follow if you tried. The villains in formula fiction aren’t people. They’re obstacles wearing faces. Abstractions to be overcome so the hero can complete their arc.

This is what happens when writers skip the psychological work. When empathy stays performative. When the ego protects itself from the contamination of genuinely understanding the opposition. You get villains who function mechanically but collapse under the slightest scrutiny. Who exist to be defeated rather than understood.

And readers feel it, even when they can’t name it. They finish the book and forget the antagonist’s name by the following week. Nothing lingers. Nothing haunts. The villain was never real enough to leave a mark.

The Craft Principle

If you can only write characters you like, you’re not writing fiction. You’re writing propaganda for your own ego.

The work is to understand people. All of them. Including the ones whose existence makes you uncomfortable, whose beliefs threaten yours, whose choices you find repugnant. Psychology gives you the scaffolding: the attachment styles, the defense mechanisms, the shame and wound and compensation that drive human behavior beneath the surface. Method acting gives you the practice: the discipline of asking what would I do rather than what would a villain do.

The result is characters who feel like they exist independently of your approval. Who breathe on the page because you’ve breathed through them. Whose interiority is so coherent that readers can’t dismiss them, can’t write them off, can’t maintain comfortable distance.

I’ve written before about what this produces on the page.

This essay is about what it requires from the author. The psychological risk. The ego dissolution. The willingness to find the villain inside yourself and understand them well enough to write them true.

The alternative is children’s morality plays dressed in adult clothing. Stories where the good people are good because they’re like you, and the bad people are bad because they’re not. Safe. Predictable. Forgettable.

You can write that if you want. But don’t mistake it for craft.

Next week: Why Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s Game of the Year win matters for worldbuilders, and the uncomfortable question the game asks anyone who builds fictional worlds.

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Fair winds,
D. S. Black

None. Two seasons of television—grief, found family, betrayal, sacrifice, love, rage—communicated entirely through action, expression, and silence.

This shouldn’t work. Every writing manual insists dialogue is essential. Every screenwriting course teaches you to reveal character through what people say. Prose workshops drill you on subtext within conversation, on the telling pause, on what characters mean versus what they state.

Genndy Tartakovsky ignored all of it. And made one of the most emotionally devastating pieces of fiction in the last decade.

This essay isn’t a review. It’s an autopsy—a dissection of why wordless storytelling works, and what prose writers, game designers, and anyone building narrative can steal from it.

The Hierarchy Most Writers Get Backwards

Here’s what Tartakovsky understands that most of us don’t: body language is the architecture. Dialogue is furniture.

We’ve been trained to think of physical description as seasoning—the “he crossed his arms” you sprinkle between lines of speech, the “she looked away” that signals emotional subtext. Beats. Stage direction. Garnish on the main course.

Primal inverts this completely. The physical behavior isn’t supporting the emotional content. It is the emotional content. When Spear grieves, we see his body curl inward, see the way he holds space around the absence. When Fang protects, we see her position herself between threat and ally before the threat even materializes. When trust fractures between them, we see the physical distance open—literal space becoming emotional truth.

No internal monologue to clarify. No dialogue to state the subtext. Just bodies in space, communicating everything that matters.

The radical claim: if your scene collapses without dialogue, you’ve built on sand. The words should be punctuation, not load-bearing structure. And most of us—myself included, for years—have been building upside down.

Demonstration

Theory is cheap. Let me show you what I mean.

Here’s the same emotional beat written three ways: a subordinate announces he’s transferring to a new master. The man who “collected” him—who views ownership as identity—receives the news. The subordinate, who has always seen more than he let on, chooses this moment to stop extending that courtesy.

Version 1: Dialogue-Forward

“I’m returning this.” Calix held out the bolt pistol. “My new master provides his own tools.”

“Your new master.” Saren let the words hang. “Origen.”

“Yes.”

“And what does he see in you, I wonder? The controlled violence? The useful savagery?” Saren’s laugh was soft, almost admiring. “He’ll catalog you. File you away in that vast archive of his. Is that what you want? To be understood?”

“You speak as if understanding is a threat.”

“For men like us? It is.” Saren was quiet for a moment. “He’ll find the hollow places, Fellner. The ones you’ve papered over. He’ll name them. And once something is named, it can be used.”

“Like you used mine.”

“I gave yours purpose. There’s a difference.”

“Is there?” Calix’s voice was quiet. “The storm you hold back must be immense.”

Silence. When Saren spoke again, something had changed. “Origen taught you that. That particular cruelty.”

“No. I’ve seen it since Margard. I simply never had the words.”

This works. The subtext is present—Saren’s fear of being known, his possessiveness framed as protection, Calix’s deliberate withdrawal of a courtesy he’d been extending all along. A playwright could stage this. Pinter could make it sing. The rhythm carries genuine weight.

Version 2: Dialogue + Integrated Beats

“I’m returning this.” Calix held out the bolt pistol, grip-first. “My new master provides his own tools.”

Saren didn’t take it. He circled instead, boots marking a slow rhythm on the deck. “Your new master. Origen.” He stopped at the viewport, silhouette framed against the burning star. “And what does the old scholar see in you, I wonder?”

“Purpose.”

“Purpose.” Saren turned, smile playing at his mouth. “He’ll catalog you, Fellner. Every trauma indexed. Every wound cross-referenced.” He moved closer. “Is that what you want? To be understood?”

Calix remained still, the pistol extended, untaken.

“For men like us, understanding is violation.” Saren’s voice dropped. “I never named your hollow places. Did you notice? I let you keep them.”

“And I extended you the same courtesy.” Calix met his gaze. “Until now.”

Saren went still.

“The storm you hold back must be immense.”

The smile didn’t fade—it froze. Something behind Saren’s eyes shuttered, then cracked.

“Origen taught you that,” he said finally. “That particular knife.”

“No. I’ve seen it since Margard. I simply never chose to say it aloud.”

Also competent. The movement creates tension, the beats add information rather than merely labeling emotion, the physicality supports without overwhelming. This is professional prose fiction—physical behavior integrated with speech, each informing the other. Most published work lives in this register.

Version 3: Body Language as Architecture

“My new master provides his own tools, Lord Captain,” Calix replied, his voice a level stone cast into turbulent waters.

The words seemed to suction all sound from the cavernous room. The slow, rhythmic clicking of Saren’s boots ceased. He went utterly still, his head tilting fractionally, like a predator that has just caught an unexpected, dangerous scent on the wind.

“Your... master,” Saren repeated, the words a low, dangerous purr.

He reached out, his movement a slow, meandering approach. His gloved fingers, splayed, did not touch Calix’s face, but instead went to the high collar of his new uniform coat. He adjusted it—a proprietary gesture disguised as paternal care.

“Look at you. Dressed in his sober colors, reciting his cold logic.” His other hand settled on the Grave-Pelt at Calix’s throat, thumb brushing against cold, dead bone. “But beneath it all... the beast I found still lingers.”

For a long, suspended moment, the predatory focus in his eyes wavered. The carefully constructed mask seemed to fracture—not into anger, but into something older. The sharp gaze softened, becoming distant, lost. It was the look of a boy adrift in a cold and empty void.

Calix saw it.

“The storm you hold back must be immense.”

The words were a key turning a lock Saren had forgotten existed. For a silent moment, the door to the hollow space within him swung open, exposing the raw, lonely void he had spent centuries papering over with gilt and fury. He looked seen. Utterly, completely seen.

Then the moment shattered. The mask slammed back into place—colder, more perfect, infinitely more dangerous than before.

What Each Version Can Do

These aren’t failures and successes. They’re different instruments.

Version 1 is how a playwright might approach the scene—dialogue as primary instrument, subtext carried in rhythm and what remains unsaid. The power is in the pauses, the implication, the way “I simply never had the words” lands differently than a direct accusation would.

Version 2 is professional prose fiction—physical behavior integrated with speech, each informing the other. Saren’s circling establishes threat. His stillness after Calix’s line registers the hit. The beats support the dialogue without overwhelming it.

Both are legitimate craft choices. Both can be executed brilliantly.

But here’s what they cannot do:

In Version 3, the scene communicates before anyone speaks. The cessation of Saren’s clicking boots—that arrested motion—tells you the power dynamic shifted before “your master” leaves his mouth. The collar adjustment violates more than any stated claim of ownership could. Saren’s fingers on the Grave-Pelt, thumb against dead bone, says I still own this wildness without a single word about possession.

And the mask fracturing—that involuntary collapse into the “boy adrift in empty void”—happens in silence, in physical transformation, before Calix ever delivers the killing blow. The wound opens in the body before the word names it.

Some revelations, spoken aloud, become smaller. The moment Saren says “you’ve hurt me” or Calix says “I see through you,” the power drains from the scene. The dialogue in Version 3 is minimal—punctuation rather than structure. The physical behavior carries the entire emotional payload.

This isn’t prescriptive. Dialogue-forward writers exist and thrive—Mamet, Pinter, Elmore Leonard. Their work does things mine cannot. The stage has constraints that demand speech carry weight prose can distribute elsewhere.

But most writers don’t choose dialogue-heavy. They default to it—building the way they were taught without examining why, treating physical description as the beats between the “real” content.

The question isn’t which approach is correct. It’s whether you’re making the choice consciously.

What Failure Actually Looks Like

I intentionally created at least competent examples above so they wouldn’t be strawmen for my point. But that might not illustrate what failure actually looks like, so let me give you something to avoid.

There’s a fourth version that doesn’t appear above—the one that reaches for body language but flinches at the last moment.

“A wave of hatred washed over him.” “The figure moved with predatory grace.” “His terrifying presence absorbed the light.”

These are labels wearing costumes. The writer gestures at physicality without committing to it—still naming the emotion, still announcing the threat, just with more adjectives. “Predatory grace” isn’t an image. It’s a tag. “Absorbed the light” isn’t visual description. It’s shorthand for “this is the dark scary part.”

This is worse than Version 1, which at least knows what instrument it’s playing. Version 1 trusts dialogue to carry weight. Label-heavy prose trusts nothing—not the dialogue, not the body, not the reader. It hedges everywhere, labels everything, and mistakes adjective density for atmosphere.

Why This Matters Beyond Prose

The psychological architecture underneath the above scene is extensive. Saren von Aurastor is a man built entirely from scar tissue—an amnesiac survivor who’s spent centuries constructing a performance so total it’s fused with whatever identity remains beneath. His possessiveness isn’t cruelty; it’s terror of losing control dressed in gilt and fury. Origen Thule, the “new master,” is his perfect opposite—a stillness so ancient it warps everything around it. Calix is caught between two gravitational forces, and in that moment, he chooses to stop being collected.

For the full psychological breakdowns:

None of that is stated in Version 3. But all of it is present—in the arrested motion, the collar adjustment, the mask fracturing. The physical behavior is an iceberg. Readers feel the mass beneath the waterline without needing it diagrammed.

Versions 1 and 2 can’t carry that weight. The moment you state Saren’s psychology—”he felt the terror of losing control”—you’ve shrunk it. Named it. Put it in a box the reader can dismiss. The body failing to maintain its performance is the revelation. Anything spoken after is aftermath.

This is why the principle matters for any media, not only prose.

Tartakovsky isn’t working in prose. He’s working in pure visual sequence—animation that will never have the luxury of interiority. And yet Primal carries psychological complexity that most dialogue-heavy fiction can’t touch. Spear’s grief isn’t explained. His bond with Fang isn’t declared. His capacity for violence and tenderness aren’t reconciled through conversation. They coexist in his body, visible in how he moves, what he protects, where he positions himself in frame.

Games face the same constraint. Combat, traversal, environmental storytelling—wordless by necessity. The narrative designer who understands body language as architecture can make a character’s fighting style communicate psychology, their positioning relative to the player speak relationship. These aren’t cutscene problems. They’re design problems, solvable with the same principles Tartakovsky deploys.

The question for any narrative medium becomes: what can the body say that speech would diminish?

What Tartakovsky Actually Does

Primal isn’t just “animation without dialogue.” It’s a systematic deployment of physical storytelling techniques that most writers never consciously learn. Here’s what to steal:

Distance as Emotional State

Watch where Spear and Fang position themselves relative to each other across the series. Early episodes: wary distance, neither willing to expose their flank. As trust builds, they sleep closer. After betrayal or conflict, the gap reopens—literal space measuring emotional breach.

Tartakovsky never cuts to a character thinking “I’m not sure I trust her yet.” He doesn’t need to. The three feet of empty ground between them says it. When that distance finally closes—when Spear sleeps against Fang’s side for the first time—the audience feels the magnitude of what’s been earned precisely because no one announced it.

Craft application: Before writing dialogue, ask where your characters are standing. Are they facing each other or angled away? Who has their back exposed? Who’s nearest the exit? The blocking often knows what the scene is about before you do.

What Gets Faced, What Gets Avoided

Characters reveal themselves through what they’re willing to look at.

Spear, early in the series, cannot look at fire without his body going rigid—the trauma of losing his family encoded in his physical response to flame. He doesn’t explain this. He doesn’t have flashbacks with convenient voiceover. His body flinches, orients away, and we understand.

Later, when he’s able to sit beside a fire with Fang nearby, the progress is visible. Not because he’s announced healing, but because the flinch is gone. His shoulders have unlocked. He can face what once destroyed him.

Craft application: What does your character avoid looking at? What do they always orient toward? These micro-movements reveal psychology more honestly than any internal monologue. The character who never makes eye contact. The one who always positions themselves facing the door. The one whose gaze keeps drifting to someone’s hands. These aren’t quirks—they’re archaeology.

Violence as Character Signature

Every fight in Primal is a character study.

Early Spear fights desperate and reactive—a survivor, not a warrior. He takes hits he shouldn’t, makes inefficient choices, wins through sheer refusal to die. As the series progresses, his combat evolves. He becomes strategic. He starts positioning to protect Fang’s blind spots. His violence becomes relational—not just “how do I survive this” but “how do I keep us alive.”

Fang’s combat is different in kind. Predator logic. Patient when patience serves, explosive when the opening appears. She doesn’t fight like a human because she isn’t one, and Tartakovsky never lets us forget that her psychology operates on different architecture.

When they fight together—the synchronization, the wordless coordination, each covering what the other can’t—you’re watching relationship made kinetic. Trust expressed in who takes point. Love expressed in who absorbs the hit meant for the other.

Craft application: How your character fights is who they are under pressure. The calculating one who waits for openings. The explosive one who commits everything to the first strike. The protective one who keeps drifting between threat and ally. Combat isn’t action sequence—it’s characterization at the pace of violence. If you can swap your protagonist for a different character and the fight reads identically, you’ve written choreography, not story.

Stillness vs. Motion as Character Signature

Spear is motion. Restless, pacing, burning energy even at rest. His trauma expresses as inability to be still—keep moving or the grief catches up.

Fang is stillness. The predator patience of something that can wait hours for the right moment. Her motion, when it comes, is explosive precisely because the stillness preceded it.

This contrast does relational work. When Spear finally learns to be still beside Fang—when his body can rest in her presence—we’re watching him heal. When Fang moves restlessly, something is wrong. Their baselines are established so clearly that deviation becomes communication.

Craft application: What’s your character’s resting state? Stillness or motion? When they break pattern, it means something. The always-pacing character who goes still has just made a decision. The statue who starts moving is about to act. Establish the baseline so the deviation can speak.

The Accumulated Image

Tartakovsky trusts repetition.

Spear and Fang share meat after a kill. The first time, it’s wary—two predators circling the same resource. By the tenth time, it’s ritual. By the twentieth, it’s communion. The gesture hasn’t changed. The meaning has transformed through accumulation.

This is how relationship gets built without declaration. Not “I love you” but a hundred small actions that accrete into something undeniable. The audience isn’t told they’ve bonded. The audience has watched the bond constructed, frame by frame, meal by meal, fight by fight.

Craft application: What repeated gesture defines your characters’ relationship? What action, insignificant at first, becomes sacred through repetition? Don’t announce the bond. Build it in accumulated image until the reader realizes they’re invested without knowing when it happened.

The Test

Here’s how to know if you’ve built on architecture or sand:

Take a scene you’ve written. Strip out all dialogue. Every word spoken, gone.

Does the scene still communicate? Can you follow the emotional arc through pure physical behavior—who moves toward, who retreats, who can’t meet eyes, whose hands betray what their words hid?

If yes, your dialogue is doing its proper job: punctuation, emphasis, the precise word at the precise moment. The architecture is underneath, load-bearing and invisible.

If no—if the scene collapses into characters standing in a void, waiting for their next line—you’ve built the house out of furniture. The dialogue isn’t enhancing; it’s compensating. And your scene will never land with the force it could.

This isn’t about removing dialogue from your work. It’s about building the foundation first. Then adding the words that need to be there—and only those.

The Cathedral

Primal isn’t a show that happens to lack dialogue. It’s a thesis statement: everything essential about story—character, relationship, growth, loss—can be communicated through action and image alone. Tartakovsky didn’t work around a limitation. He proved that what we treat as essential is often crutch.

The words we lean on are frequently the words we hide behind. The explanation that preempts the reader’s own understanding. The dialogue that states what the body already showed. The interior monologue that hand-holds through subtext anyone paying attention already caught.

Economy is sacred. Tartakovsky built a cathedral of silence, and it speaks louder than most fiction ever will.

Next time you write a scene, try building it mute. Block it like a silent film. Find out what the bodies know before anyone opens their mouth.

You might discover the scene was already finished. The dialogue you were planning to write? Furniture for a room that didn’t need it.

For more craft analysis, character breakdowns, and worldbuilding deep-dives, subscribe. I post every Tuesday.

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Fair winds,
—D. S. Black

We’ve been telling this story for centuries. We rarely examine why it works—or why most writers get it wrong.

The transformation isn’t the point. The containment is.

Dual-nature characters aren’t compelling because they transform. They’re compelling because they contain both states simultaneously—and the tension of that containment is what creates character magnetism.

Somerset in his turquoise dress whites, speaking in measured aristocratic tones, knowing he contains something feral that the sea recognizes. Conan the barbarian who understands statecraft better than the kings he deposes. The surgeon whose hands know violence and healing with equal intimacy. The hyena king whose gutter philosophy cuts deeper than any lion’s court rhetoric.

This is the character architecture that defines my work. Not the cliché split personality, but the more sophisticated construction: characters who are authentically both things at once. The officer who is also the beast. The scavenger who is also the philosopher. The barbarian who is also the statesman.

The Transformation Trap

Most writers treat dual nature as a binary switch. Calm state. Trigger event. Beast mode. Return to calm.

This is the lazy version.

Bruce Banner gets angry, becomes Hulk, smashes things, reverts. The werewolf transforms at the full moon, loses control, wakes up confused. The berserker enters rage, blacks out, surveys the carnage afterward.

What’s wrong with this model:

It’s circumstantial, not definitional. The character “becomes” a beast when angry, scared, or lunar-aligned. The duality is something that happens to them, not something they are.

It removes agency. The beast “takes over.” The civilized self is a passenger, not a pilot. This is less interesting because the character isn’t choosing anything—they’re being hijacked by their own psychology.

It’s predictable. Readers know the trigger. They know the result. The tension becomes mechanical: will he get angry? Yes. Will he transform? Yes. Will he feel bad afterward? Yes.

The best versions of these characters—like Hulk in recent portrayals where Banner and Hulk negotiate, integrate, coexist—have moved toward what actually works: simultaneous containment rather than sequential transformation.

The switch isn’t the story. The cage is.

Simultaneous Containment

Here’s the reframe: the sophisticated dual-nature character doesn’t become the beast when provoked. They are always both, and they choose which face to show.

The civilized exterior doesn’t suppress the primal. It displays it through contrast.

Think about what a uniform actually does. Naval dress whites, aristocratic protocol, the measured cadence of command voice—these aren’t hiding the predator underneath. They’re framing it. The cage makes the beast legible. Without the bars, you can’t see what’s pacing inside.

In my novel The Reply, there’s a moment where Captain Somerset takes the wheel during a storm that should kill everyone aboard. Here’s what his first lieutenant sees:

His eyes were wide, not with terror, but with a state of absolute, predatory focus. His shoulders strained against the fine turquoise wool of his uniform coat, the elegant white countershading along the inner sleeves and flanks stark against the bruised, black sky. He looked like a predator. He looked like prey. He looked like a man the sea had already claimed but who refused to acknowledge it.

Predator and prey. Officer and beast. In the same sentence. The uniform doesn’t hide what he is—the straining wool, the countershading designed to echo sacred dolphins, the formal costume barely containing something feral—it reveals it through tension.

This is the principle: not transformation, but containment. Not “he becomes dangerous when pushed” but “he is always dangerous, and what you’re seeing is how he holds it.”

Three Expressions: Somerset, Gore, and Daud

The dual nature doesn’t have one shape. In my cast, three characters demonstrate three different expressions of the same principle.

Somerset: The Performed Gentleman

Somerset’s charm is calculation. His rakish smile is a weapon forged from humiliation—at his first aristocratic gala, a noblewoman treated him like an exotic pet, praising his “raw talent” with amused condescension. That moment created the persona: the seductive, dangerous, magnetic officer who plays their games better than they do while containing something they can’t name.

The sea recognizes what’s underneath. The Elder Fathom—the sentient, predatory ocean of my world—is obsessed with Somerset specifically because it sees past the turquoise wool to the feral thing he contains. His supernatural intuition, his ability to read storms as moods and currents as intentions, comes from this: he communes with something vast and hungry because part of him speaks its language.

The gentleman is real. The beast is real. The tension between them is what makes him a witch-captain.

Gore: The Surgical Killer

Lieutenant Gore’s dual nature inverts the expectation. Where Somerset’s beast is passion barely contained, Gore’s beast is coldness—precision weaponized.

When a Navigator goes missing—slipped overboard sometime during the chaos—Gore delivers the news with clinical efficiency:

He said it as if he were explaining a mechanical failure. A component that had exceeded its tolerances and failed. Unfortunate, but predictable.

“Already done, sir.” He tapped the ledger under his arm.

Death logged, filed, processed. His beast isn’t violence—it’s the reptilian efficiency that can catalog a soul and move to the next task without pause.

His aristocratic protocol, his obsessive adherence to regulation, his ice-cold formality—these aren’t suppressing emotion. They’re the shape his predation takes. Gore’s beast doesn’t rage. It calculates. The civilization is the weapon.

Some readers expect “cold” characters to secretly have warmth underneath. Gore doesn’t. His inability to feel warmth isn’t a flaw to overcome—it’s the feature that makes him devastating. The reptilian focus behind his protocol is the point.

Daud: The Professional Predator

Daud van Richter, the Befruoren operative who becomes Somerset’s unlikely mirror, demonstrates a third variation: the beast as profession.

Daud’s knife found the space between the fourth and fifth rib with the precision of a cartographer plotting a coastline. It was not a dramatic thrust. It was a medical procedure.

And afterward—no catharsis:

He washed his hands carefully, watching the faint pink swirl away into clear, clean water... adjusted his coat, smoothing the severe lines of the Befruoren cut.

Mind already on the next variable. The containment continues after violence. That’s the beast as profession.

No berserker rage. No loss of control. No transformation. Daud is a killer the way a surgeon is a surgeon—through training, practice, and the craftsmanship of violence. His “civilized” presentation (the elegant fingers, the measured voice, the patience) isn’t containing something wild. It’s containing something professional.

The principle across all three: the “primal” doesn’t have to mean rage. Somerset’s beast is passion. Gore’s beast is precision. Daud’s beast is professional competence at killing. The containment is what matters, not the specific shape of what’s contained.

The Inversion Principle: Conan and Chaa

The dual nature works in either direction. The interesting characters aren’t always officers containing beasts. Sometimes they’re beasts containing officers.

Conan: Barbarism as Costume

Robert E. Howard’s Conan isn’t compelling because he’s a barbarian. He’s compelling because he understands statecraft, reads political situations with a general’s eye, and recognizes civilization for what it is—organized savagery with etiquette.

“Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarism must ultimately triumph.”

The primal exterior contains strategic intelligence. Conan survives throne rooms and battlefields because he operates in both registers. The crown doesn’t change him—it reveals what was always there. The barbarian contains the king.

Chaa: The Gutter Philosopher

My hyena king from Clawstar—a different project, different genre, same architecture—takes this further. Chaa is a literal scavenger—second-tier male in a matriarchal clan, destined for subservience and scraps. When the lions’ “righteous cull” murdered his queens, his sisters, his matriarchs, he filled the power vacuum not with nobility or tradition but with teeth and terrifying clarity.

“Their law is a cage, and they are surprised when the prisoners rattle the bars. Let the dark come. At least it is honest.”

That’s not beast-speak. That’s philosophy. Cynical wisdom forged in the gutter, sharper than anything the lion courts produce. The prideclaws who cull his kind believe they’re civilized. Chaa understands that their civilization is just violence with better aesthetics—and his “barbarism” contains more honest truth than their courts ever will.

To his followers, Chaa is a necessary monster. To his enemies, he is the embodiment of the chaos they claim to fight—never realizing they were the ones who created him.

What Chaa adds that Conan doesn’t: he’s not romantic. No noble savage. He’s a king of scraps, a philosopher of the gutter, whose worldview was proven correct by the very powers who look down on him. His wisdom isn’t despite his circumstances—it’s because of them. The scavenger’s perspective sees what the apex predator’s cannot.

The principle: dual nature doesn’t require one state to be “higher” than the other. Somerset’s beast is contained by his officer. Chaa’s philosopher is contained by his beast. Both create tension. Both create magnetism. The hierarchy is irrelevant—the containment is what matters.

Building Dual Nature from the Ground Up

How to construct this in your own characters:

Make it definitional, not circumstantial.

Don’t give them a trigger. Build the duality into their baseline psychology. The question isn’t “when do they become dangerous” but “what keeps them from being dangerous all the time.” The containment should be constant, visible, and load-bearing.

The cage must be visible.

Uniform. Protocol. Ritual. Manners. Code. Whatever your character uses to structure themselves—it shouldn’t hide the beast. It should frame it. Readers need to see the cage and what’s pacing inside. The strain is the point. Somerset’s shoulders straining against turquoise wool. Gore’s rigid formality barely containing reptilian focus. The visual tension between presentation and content.

Let the civilized and primal serve different functions.

The officer makes you effective—strategy, command, social navigation, long-term thinking. The beast makes you dangerous—survival, violence, instinct, immediate action. Both are necessary. Neither is “the real them.” Characters need access to both registers to survive hostile worlds.

Avoid the binary.

No “normal mode” vs “beast mode.” The character should be readable as both in every scene. Readers should always be slightly uncertain which face they’re seeing, because both faces are always present. The charm that might be genuine or might be calculation. The coldness that might be discipline or might be predation. Keep both possibilities alive.

Make the containment costly.

The cage takes energy to maintain. Protocol is exhausting. Performance is labor. Let readers see what it costs to hold the beast—the drinking, the isolation, the relationships that can’t survive proximity to something that controlled. The containment shouldn’t be effortless. It should be the character’s primary ongoing work.

Why This Works in Grimdark

Grimdark demands characters who can survive horror without breaking. Cozy fiction can have protagonists who are purely civilized—their worlds don’t require predation. Grimdark worlds do.

The mathematics are simple:

Pure civilization breaks under pressure. It can’t do what survival requires. When violence is necessary, the purely civilized character hesitates, compromises, or shatters.

Pure beast can’t navigate complexity. No strategy, no patience, no social intelligence. Raw predation without containment burns out fast—killed by something smarter, betrayed by something more patient.

Both simultaneously? Devastating.

Somerset survives the Elder Fathom not because he’s the strongest or the most brutal, but because he can commune with something alien while still commanding a ship. Daud survives hostile territory because his violence is professional, patient, and contained by purpose. Gore survives because his predation looks like protocol—invisible until the weakness is identified.

The beast makes you dangerous. The officer makes you devastating.

And the tension between them—the visible containment, the cage that displays the predator, the strain of holding something feral inside something formal—that’s what makes characters unforgettable.

The transformation is the coward’s version. It lets writers pretend their characters are safe most of the time—that the beast only emerges under special circumstances, then goes back in its box.

The cage is harder. It requires you to write someone who is always both things, whose every polite word carries the weight of what they’re choosing not to do.

Most writers don’t trust their readers to handle that. Most readers prove them wrong.

If this resonated, you might also want to read the companion piece on why compelling beats likeable every time:

For more craft analysis, character breakdowns, and worldbuilding deep-dives, subscribe. I post every Tuesday.

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Fair winds,
—D. S. Black

The protagonist of my novel The Reply is not a “good” person. Certainly not in the modern definition. What he is: perfectly adapted to his world.

Captain Henry Somerset is charming—but it’s performance, a weapon he wields to disarm and seduce. He treats women like conquest trophies, drinks too much, and channels his considerable trauma into becoming excellent at violence. His loyalty is fierce but possessive. His competence borders on inhuman. When he smiles, it’s calculation, not often warmth.

He’s also the most compelling character I’ve ever written.

In Nhera, where the ocean is sentient and predatory, where competence is the only thing standing between you and drowning, Somerset is exactly what survival requires. He’s as dangerous as the world that forged him.

And yet every writing workshop, every social media thread, every virtue-signaling checklist would tell me he’s “problematic.” That I should soften him, redeem him, make him learn to be kinder.

Because here’s what modern writing advice gets catastrophically wrong: sympathy is not the same as compelling. And the relentless push to make protagonists “likeable” is producing fiction that’s predictable, safe, and—worst of all—boring.

The Sympathy Trap

We’re told protagonists must be:

• Kind (or trying to be)

• Morally legible

• Motivated by care for others

• Redeemable through growth

• Fundamentally good

This isn’t craft advice. It’s ideology masquerading as technique.

The moving target of what counts as acceptable character behavior shifts with political winds. What’s “sympathetic” in 2025 would’ve been unrecognizable in 2015. Writers tie themselves in knots trying to hit a standard that changes faster than they can revise.

The result? Protagonists who are safe. Predictable. Designed by committee to offend no one.

If you always know your protagonist will choose compassion, help the vulnerable, and learn to be better—what’s the point of reading? That’s not narrative tension. That’s cozy political porn.

The Diegetic Problem: When the Author Shows Their Hand

Here’s the craft issue: authorial judgment kills immersion.

When your narrative voice signals disapproval of a character’s choices—when the prose itself leans in to let readers know “this is bad and you should feel bad about it”—you’ve broken the fictional dream. You’re no longer in the story. You’re being lectured about the story by someone who needs you to have the correct opinion.

Diegetic writing—fiction that stays inside the world without external commentary—requires neutrality. Not moral relativism. Neutrality. You present the character’s logic, their context, their choices, without the narrative voice editorializing.

Example of non-diegetic writing:

Somerset smiled that cruel, predatory smile that revealed everything ugly about his treatment of women, his need to dominate, his fundamental brokenness that he refused to address.

Diegetic version:

Somerset smiled.

The first version is the author controlling your interpretation. The second trusts you to see what’s happening and form your own judgment. One is propaganda. The other is fiction.

Fiction isn’t an instruction manual. It’s not modeling correct behavior. It’s exploring what humans do under pressure.

When you write morally complex characters without narrative judgment, readers engage authentically. They think. They debate. They feel complicated things about people doing complicated things in complicated circumstances.

The moment you signal which opinion you want them to have, you’ve turned fiction into a morality play. And readers who came for story, not sermon, check out.

There’s disposable fiction—stories consumed and forgotten. And then there’s fiction that stays with readers for years because the author trusted them to form their own interpretation. When you let readers build their own relationship with the text, when you resist the urge to guide them toward the “correct” takeaway, you create space for genuine engagement.

Writing that aspires to educate readers on morality is a virtue signal, not a snapshot of human experience. And virtue signals don’t stick with anyone—they just demonstrate the author performed the right opinions at the time of publication.

Why Unlikeable Protagonists Work: The Somerset Case Study

Let me be specific about why my protagonist works despite (because of?) violating every “likeable protagonist” checklist:

He’s adapted to his environment. Nhera isn’t a world where kindness is rewarded. The ocean is sentient, predatory, and wants you. Ships disappear. Sailors drown. The sea whispers promises and threats in equal measure. In that context, Somerset’s weaponized charm, his possessive loyalty, his refusal to be vulnerable—these aren’t character flaws. They’re survival traits. The world made him dangerous because anything less gets claimed by the depths.

He’s a commoner who clawed his way to Post-Captain through merit alone. The aristocracy despises him for it. His response? Seduce their daughters, drink their wine, and beat them at their own games while smiling like he was born to it.

The charm is trauma response. At his first high-society gala, a noblewoman treated him like an exotic pet—praising his “raw talent” and “unrefined energy” with amused condescension. That humiliation forged his rakish persona. He treats women of that class as conquest to reclaim the power stripped from him. It’s pathological. It’s ugly. It’s psychologically coherent.

His competence is the point. Somerset survives because he’s the best naval officer in Arune. Not the kindest. Not the most moral. The best. His skill at reading storms, navigating impossible waters, and commanding a ship borders on supernatural. The sea itself is obsessed with him.

Readers don’t like him. They’re fascinated by him.

Competence > Sympathy in Grimdark

Here’s what grimdark understands that cozy fiction doesn’t: interesting beats likeable every time.

Somerset doesn’t need to be sympathetic because he’s:

• Complex: His flaws have clear psychological origins. You understand why he’s like this even if you don’t approve.

• Competent: When he takes the wheel in a storm, his crew watches a man become a god. That’s more compelling than any amount of emotional availability.

• Consistent: He doesn’t apologize for what he is. No redemption arc where he learns to be nicer. He’s a weapon pointed at the ocean, and the ocean wants him back.

The moment you make Somerset “sympathetic,” you lose what makes him work. If he starts treating women better, stops drinking, learns healthy emotional expression—he becomes predictable. And predictable characters are narrative dead weight.

Why This Works Across My Cast

This isn’t just Somerset. My entire main cast operates on “compelling > sympathetic”:

Lieutenant Gore: Aristocratic, protocol-obsessed, cold. Loyal to Somerset not from affection but from pragmatic respect for competence. Possibly gay, definitely repressed. Would execute a crew member for insubordination without hesitation.

Daud van Richter: Richter’s bastard half-brother, her deniable knife. Missing molars from a job gone wrong. Kills efficiently, questions rarely. When Somerset forces him to choose between completing his mission or saving Somerset’s life, he chooses Somerset—not from friendship, but from recognition. Two weapons acknowledging each other.

What “Flaws” Actually Mean

Modern writing workshops treat character flaws like:

• Small, manageable quirks

• Opportunities for growth

• Things to be overcome by Act III

That’s not a flaw. That’s a plot device with a redemption timer.

Real flaws—the kind that make characters jump off the page—are:

• Structural to their psychology: Somerset’s performative charm isn’t a bad habit he can unlearn. It’s load-bearing architecture holding up a psyche built on class resentment and childhood humiliation.

• Incompatible with easy redemption: You can’t “fix” Gore’s aristocratic coldness without fundamentally destroying who he is. His inability to feel warmth isn’t a bug—it’s the feature that makes him work as an intelligence officer.

• Morally uncomfortable: Daud’s competence at violence isn’t softened by reluctance or regret. He’s good at killing and knows it. Readers can be uncomfortable with that. Good.

The Permission You Need

If you’re writing grimdark, horror, psychological thrillers, or any genre where stakes are survival rather than personal growth:

Stop trying to make readers like your protagonist.

Make them:

• Competent at something that matters

• Psychologically coherent (even if ugly)

• Consistent in their damage

• Adapted to the world they inhabit

• Interesting enough that readers have to keep reading or watching.

Somerset isn’t sympathetic by Bluesky standards. He’s a traumatized weapon who treats the sea like an abusive lover and his crew like the only family he’ll allow himself. He uses people. He performs constantly. He’s probably going to die badly.

But I can’t stop writing him.

And readers who claim they want “likeable protagonists” keep telling me they can’t stop reading about him either.

There’s no shame in finding complex, dangerous, morally ambiguous characters compelling. That’s not a failure of your values. That’s proof you understand that fiction isn’t a morality exam.

The shame comes from people who need you to perform the correct opinion about fictional characters—as if your engagement with Somerset says something damning about your real-world ethics.

It doesn’t. Fiction is where we explore what we may not tolerate in reality. That’s the whole point.

The Craft Principle

Compelling characters operate on internal logic, not external approval.

Somerset’s psychology makes sense to him. His actions follow from his trauma, his competence, his relationship with the sea. He doesn’t break character to be more palatable. He doesn’t soften for audience comfort.

That internal coherence—that refusal to apologize for what he is—creates the magnetism that sympathy never could.

Sympathy is asking for permission. Complexity is a territorial claim.

When you write for sympathy, you’re asking: “Is this okay? Will readers accept this?”

When you write for complexity, you’re claiming: “This is what this person is. Engage with it or don’t.”

One creates cozy political porn. The other creates crap like The Reply.

I wrote a companion piece about antagonists.

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Fair winds,
—D. S. Black

In my novel The Reply, the ship’s surgeon is performing emergency extraction on a poisoned officer. A Fathom-touched spur—chitinous, barbed, spreading corruption—is buried in his liver. The ship is being thrown by hostile seas. She’s losing him. And in the small universe between her hands and his body, something shifts.

She stops being a surgeon.

She becomes something else.

“Not detached. That was a lie she told herself. She was focused. There was a difference. Detachment implied distance, safety, the luxury of separation between observer and observed. Focus was the opposite. Focus was the wolf’s jaws locking, the predator’s entire being narrowing to a single point of absolute, consuming intent.”

She’s not performing surgery anymore.

She’s hunting.

The Thesis: Competence at Peak Level IS Predation

Here’s what fiction gets wrong about skilled characters:

We treat competence and violence as separate aesthetics. The surgeon is calm, controlled, civilised. The warrior is savage, brutal, primal. One heals, one harms. One represents order, the other chaos.

But observe someone operating at the absolute peak and you’ll see the lie.

Peak competence doesn’t just resemble predation. It is predation.

The cognitive state is identical. The physiological responses are identical. The tunnel vision, the time dilation, the way the body becomes pure instrument and thought dissolves into action—these aren’t metaphors. They’re the same neurological mechanisms that turn a wolf into a perfectly efficient killing machine.

The only difference is the packaging.

The surgeon wears a lab coat. The officer wears dress whites. The scientist wears academic credentials. But underneath the civilised veneer, when they enter that state of absolute focus, they’re all doing the same thing: hunting problems through complex territory with lethal precision.

And it looks violent. It looks feral. It looks like something that should terrify you.

Because it should.

Proof: The Intelligence Analyst

I know what this feels like because I’ve lived it.

Years ago, working signals intelligence, I was in a training exercise. The scenario: locate and map a high-value target based on fragmentary data. Everyone in my class was looking at the obvious cluster—a concentration of outgoing signals that screamed “command center.” Textbook. The kind of pattern recognition they’d drilled into us.

But there was something else. A small anomaly. A single signal, barely there, coming from a location everyone else had dismissed as irrelevant.

I felt it before I understood it.

That lance of ice down the spine. That physical sensation that says wait—look again. My vision narrowed. The rest of the room disappeared. I wasn’t thinking anymore—I was tracking. Following the thread. My hands were already pulling up data on that location before my conscious mind had articulated why.

And there it was.

The signal led to a facility that turned out to be a weapons cache. Not the command center—the supply chain. The place where everyone else was looking was important. The place I found was critical.

I remember the feeling when it clicked. That surge of euphoria, almost erotic in its intensity. My entire body responded. I felt feral. I felt like a wolf that had just locked its jaws on prey and would not—could not—let go until the hunt was finished.

I became addicted to that feeling. To the moment when your brain engages and everything else falls away and you’re just—hunting. Pursuing a problem through complex territory with absolute, consuming focus.

That’s not calm analysis. That’s not detached professionalism.

That’s predation.

The Mechanism: What’s Actually Happening

When I examine what happened in my body during that moment—and what happens to Rostova during surgery, what happens to Somerset at the wheel—I see the same pattern:

The universe contracts. Peripheral awareness collapses to a single point. Everything that isn’t the problem being pursued simply ceases to exist—noise, movement, even self-preservation instinct becomes irrelevant.

Time dilates. Subjective experience slows. Seconds stretch into space to see, to consider, to act with what looks like impossible speed from the outside but feels like deliberate precision from within.

Conscious thought dissolves. The body becomes instrument guided by something deeper than decision—pattern recognition, muscle memory, expertise so thoroughly integrated it no longer requires conscious processing. The wolf doesn’t think about how to bite. It just bites.

And the body responds as if to mortal threat or sexual arousal: elevated heart rate, adrenaline spike, euphoria. This is why peak competence is addictive. It feels incredible. It feels like being fully, intensely, violently alive.

When the problem is solved—when the incision is complete, when the target is located, when the ship makes it through—there’s a release. A satisfaction that’s visceral, physical, almost post-coital.

This isn’t metaphor.

This is the same neurological cascade that makes predators efficient killers. The civilised professional and the hunting wolf are running identical software. Only the application differs.

Case Study: The Surgeon as Predator

Let me show you what this looks like in prose.

Dr. Rostova is performing emergency surgery on a poisoned officer. A Fathom-touched spur is embedded in his liver, spreading corruption. The ship is being thrown by a hostile sea. She’s losing him.

Here’s the moment she recognizes what she’s actually doing:

“She packed the wound with gauze, her movements economical, controlled, each gesture the product of a lifetime spent learning to make her body an extension of her will. But underneath the control, underneath the steady hands and the clinical precision, something else was stirring. That old, familiar sensation. The one that had made her good at this terrible work.

The hunt.”

Two words. Devastating.

She names what’s happening. And once named, the prose shifts. Watch:

“She was focused. There was a difference. Detachment implied distance, safety, the luxury of separation between observer and observed. Focus was the opposite. Focus was the wolf’s jaws locking, the predator’s entire being narrowing to a single point of absolute, consuming intent.”

The language changes. Wolf. Predator. Jaws locking. This isn’t medical terminology—this is hunting vocabulary. Because that’s what she’s doing. She’s tracking the problem (the spur, the bleed, the corruption) through complex territory (living tissue, anatomical structures, systems on the verge of failure) with lethal precision.

And then she enters the state:

“The place she went when the work became everything, when thought dissolved into pure action and her body became a precision instrument guided by something deeper than conscious decision. Her breathing slowed. Her vision sharpened. Time itself seemed to dilate, each second stretching out like honey poured in cold air, giving her space to see, to consider, to act.”

All the markers of predatory focus, rendered in prose.

But here’s the critical moment—when the civilised veneer cracks and the violence underneath shows through:

She’s been trying to extract the spur surgically. Carefully. With precision. But the venom is spreading faster than she can work, and her patient is running out of time.

“She made a decision.

Not a thought. A decision happened below thought, in that place where the hunting mind lived and breathed and acted without the luxury of ethical consideration. She abandoned the careful extraction, the methodical approach, the surgical precision that had defined her entire career.

She grabbed the spur’s shaft with forceps and pulled.”

This is the moment.

The surgeon becomes the wolf. Precision gives way to brutal efficiency. She’s no longer healing—she’s claiming. Ripping the foreign object out of her patient’s body with the same violence a predator uses to tear meat from bone.

The sound her patient makes is “not human.”

The extraction is catastrophic.

But it works.

Because sometimes, when stakes are high enough, the wolf-mind knows better than the civilised mind. Sometimes survival requires accessing that primal core underneath the professional veneer.

Even the cosmic horror entity circling in the deep recognizes what she becomes in that state:

“Beautiful, it whispered, and its voice was no longer mocking. It was reverent.”

The Fathom sees the predator. And it respects what it sees.

Cross-Discipline Application: The Same Mechanism, Different Textures

This isn’t just about surgeons or soldiers. The mechanism appears across every field where humans operate at peak capacity.

The Scientist:

He’s staring at data that doesn’t make sense. Everyone else has moved on, but he’s caught on an anomaly—a pattern that shouldn’t exist. That lance of ice shoots down his spine. Oh. This might be significant.

His universe contracts. He’s not thinking anymore—he’s pursuing. Pulling references, running calculations, testing hypotheses with a speed that looks manic from the outside but feels like perfect clarity from within. Time dilates. Hours pass like minutes. He doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep, doesn’t hear colleagues calling his name.

And then: Yes. Yes, my goodness. This is it.

The moment of breakthrough. Prey claimed. That surge of euphoria, physical and visceral, the same satisfaction a wolf feels with blood in its mouth.

The texture is different—he’s wearing a lab coat, not holding a weapon—but the cognitive state is identical. He’s hunting.

The Naval Officer:

Captain Somerset at the wheel in a storm. The wave rising is a wall of dark glass, impossibly high, and his ship is a fragile thing of wood and canvas that has no business surviving what’s coming.

But his eyes are wide—”not with terror, but with a state of absolute, predatory focus.“

He’s not thinking about seamanship anymore. His body knows. Hands on the wheel, shoulders straining against the turquoise wool of his coat, every muscle engaged. The feedback through the spokes is brutal—a current of violent force that most men couldn’t hold—but he reads it like language. The sea is speaking. He’s listening. And in the space between heartbeats, he’s calculating angles, pressures, the precise moment to turn.

Time dilates. The universe contracts to: ship, wave, wind, wheel.

His First Lieutenant observes and thinks: “He looked like a man the sea had claimed. He looked like a god.”

But what Vance is actually seeing is the predator-state made visible. Somerset hunting the correct line through impossible water with the same focus a wolf uses to track wounded prey through snow.

The Strategist:

She’s staring at a map, but she’s not seeing geography anymore. She’s seeing patterns. Troop movements, supply lines, the places where the enemy’s plan shows weakness if you know how to look. Her colleagues are talking—she doesn’t hear them. Her vision has narrowed to the single point of vulnerability she’s tracking through layers of misdirection and tactical noise.

And then she sees it. The opening. The move that turns a defensive position into a killing ground.

Her hand moves before conscious thought, placing the marker.

“There,” she says. And her voice is flat, certain, the voice of someone who’s already watched this play out in her mind and knows—knows—it will work.

That’s not analysis. That’s the hunt.

What I’ve Found in Prose That Achieves This

When I examine prose that makes this effect work—in my writing, in the rare published work that gets it right—I see patterns:

The vocabulary shifts at the moment of cognitive state change. The language tilts toward hunting terminology exactly when the character’s awareness narrows. Track. Pursue. Claim. Lock. You can feel the predatory focus through word choice alone.

Physical symptoms appear before explanation. The body responds first—breathing changes, vision sharpens, that lance of ice—and only then does understanding follow.

Thought stops appearing as thought. The prose moves from deliberation to pure action. The scalpel went in. His hands closed over the wheel. No “she decided” or “he considered”—just the wolf acting on expertise that’s become reflex.

I can’t provide you a formula for this. If you’ve felt what I’m describing—that surge when you lock onto a problem and won’t let go—you’ll recognize the mechanism in your own work. If you haven’t, no tutorial will help. This requires understanding the hunting state from the inside.

What matters is recognizing that peak competence is predation, and prose that makes readers feel it renders that state with the same intensity the character experiences it.

How I Discovered This

I found this through writing The Reply.

Somerset and Daud were supposed to be enemies who became allies. Professional respect built through shared survival. Clean. Uncomplicated.

But Somerset kept watching Daud move.

Kept tracking the efficiency, the economy of motion, the moment when Daud’s focus narrowed and something feral appeared behind his eyes. What started as tactical assessment became something else. Something charged. Something that made Somerset’s pulse quicken in ways that had nothing to do with threat evaluation.

The characters wrote themselves into territory I hadn’t intended.

And when I examined why—why that intensity appeared specifically in moments of peak performance, why watching Daud fight or navigate or simply work created that visceral response—I recognized the pattern:

I’m attracted to predatory competence.

Not metaphorically. Literally. Watching someone enter that hunting state—the tunnel vision, the dissolved thought, the moment they become pure instrument—that creates intensity in the observer. Recognition calls to recognition. The predator sees the predator and responds.

This transcends gender. Transcends circumstance. Transcends everything except the fundamental recognition: this person is operating at the absolute edge of human capability and it’s beautiful and terrible and I can’t look away.

I’ve never seen this articulated systematically before. Writers talk about “competence porn” like it’s a guilty pleasure. They talk about characters being “good at things” as craft technique. But they don’t name what’s actually happening:

Peak competence creates erotic charge because it’s predation, and watching someone hunt activates response in the observer that borders on arousal.

So I’m naming it now.

Why Grimdark Requires This

Here’s what I learned building The Reply: grimdark doesn’t work with broken incompetents stumbling through hell. That’s not grimdark. That’s nihilism. It’s watching everyone fail in a universe designed for failure. There’s no tension because there’s no hope. Just inevitable doom.

Grimdark works when you put gods in impossible situations and make them fight like wolves just to survive.

Somerset at the wheel, his hands locked on timber that’s trying to tear itself apart, reading the storm with predatory intensity while knowing it might kill him anyway.

Rostova with her hands buried in Gore’s body, hunting the bleed through damaged tissue with the certainty of a wolf tracking scent, even though she might lose him.

Daud moving through combat with that terrible grace that makes observers hold their breath.

They’re operating at divine levels of competence and they’re still not sure they’ll make it. That’s the tension. That’s where the genre lives.

The darkness only matters if someone skilled enough to navigate it is still uncertain they’ll survive. The horror only works if the predator-state gives you a chance but not a guarantee. The stakes only hit if characters who deserve to survive have to access that primal core just to see tomorrow.

This is why officers must look like gods when they work. Why competence at peak levels must be rendered with the same language you’d use for violence. Why the civilised beast architecture matters.

Because in grimdark, the civilised veneer isn’t enough. You need access to what’s underneath. You need the wolf.

And even then, you might die anyway.

That’s what makes it devastating. That’s what makes it work.

What I’m Articulating Here

I found this through writing The Reply. Through Somerset and Rostova and Daud. Through examining what worked in my prose and reverse-engineering the mechanism underneath. Through recognizing my own response patterns and understanding what they revealed about how competence functions aesthetically.

Writers talk about “competence porn” like it’s a guilty pleasure. They talk about characters being “good at things” as craft technique. But they don’t name what’s actually happening in the reader’s nervous system when skilled performance hits the page with force.

So I’m naming it:

Peak competence as predation. The civilised beast as fundamental character architecture. The hunting state as what creates magnetic charge in skilled characters.

If you’ve written characters whose competence creates visceral response in readers—if you’ve felt that charge without fully understanding the mechanism—you’ve been working in this territory. I’m articulating it systematically because I haven’t seen it named this way before, and craft principles work better when you can see the architecture underneath.

Your job as a writer is to render that state on the page. To make readers feel the moment when thought dissolves into action, when the civilised professional accesses something primal and older, when competence stops looking calm and starts looking feral.

Because that’s when it gets dangerous.

That’s when it gets beautiful.

That’s when your characters stop being merely skilled and become something readers will follow into the abyss.

The wolf is underneath the uniform. The predator is underneath the professional. The hunting state is what makes competence magnetic instead of merely admirable.

And when your characters access that—when the surgeon’s hands shift from healing to claiming, when the officer’s eyes lock with predatory focus, when the analyst seizes prey and won’t release—your readers should feel it in their spines.

The lance of ice. The narrowing vision. The recognition that they’re watching something that transcends human and approaches divine.

Peak performance looks like violence because it is violence.

And when you write it right, your readers won’t just understand that.

They’ll feel it in their teeth.

If you want more analysis of what makes fiction work at the level of physiology instead of just plot—principles identified through building it, not theory—subscribe. I post every Tuesday.

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Fair winds,
—D. S. Black

Intimate moments zoom in.

When a character’s micro-expression becomes critical—when the reader needs to see the muscle at the jaw tighten, the pupils dilate—you reduce environmental scope and bring the camera close. In sequential art, this means a panel focused on the face. In prose, it means stripping away extraneous detail and narrowing to the gesture that matters.

The principle works in reverse. When I’m drawing a scene and can’t figure out the right framing, I write it first. The prose tells me where to look.

Different crafts solve the same fundamental problem—what matters in this moment?—through different methods. Stepping outside your primary medium teaches you something about it you’d never discover otherwise.

The Bidirectional Relationship:

I work across illustration and writing because each craft keeps demanding the other.

Designing Arunean naval uniforms, I needed to understand how the fabric moved, how the countershading worked across different postures, where the closures sat on the body. So I drew turnarounds. The art revealed things the writing couldn’t—that moment when hands reach behind to secure the martingale strap showed practiced familiarity, physical flexibility, preparation as ritual. When I returned to the manuscript, I knew exactly how Somerset moved.

The way he adjusts his coat became a tell for his psychological state—controlled when fastening buttons, desperate when tearing the martingale loose. I learned that by drawing his hands.

But the reverse happens constantly. I’ll be working on a sequential piece and the composition clicks when I think about it narratively first.

Take this page—an Imperial officer caught by a Drukhari, vulnerable and out of uniform. The wide shot establishes the power dynamic: the alien looming, the human exposed, the threat made spatial. But that’s not where the emotional weight lives.

So I overlay the close-up. His face. The fangs. The sweat, the pain. The Drukhari’s eyes stay out of frame because the threat isn’t what he’s thinking—it’s what the human is experiencing. The zoom tells you what matters: not the spectacle of capture, but the cost of it.

This is what sequential art teaches writing. When emotion becomes critical, everything else falls away. The environment doesn’t matter anymore. The reader needs to see this face, right now, feeling this.

The same principle works in prose. You can describe the full scene—the threat, the room, the captor looming—or you can cut everything except: After moments, he winces, wet eyelashes parting to watch a drop of blood break between his boots.

One version gives context. The other gives intimacy.

The art showed me how to write it. The writing told me where the camera needed live for that moment.

What Zoom Actually Means:

Zoom is information hierarchy. What does the audience need to process right now? What can you strip away? What must be present?

In visual storytelling, you zoom by adjusting shot distance and environmental detail. A wide shot establishes location. A close-up on hands gripping a railing tells you about tension, exhaustion, determination—without showing the whole figure.

In prose, you zoom with sentence focus and sensory selection. You can pull wide by describing the full scene—storm, deck, crew scrambling—or push in by isolating a single detail: The polished, worn wood of the spokes. Salt spray on his knuckles.

Same craft. Different execution.

When I’m stuck in writing, I sketch the scene. When I’m stuck in a drawing, I write the beat. They’re two languages describing the same moment. Translation between them reveals what’s actually important versus what’s decorative noise.

You Don’t Need to Be Multidisciplinary to Use This:

Most people aren’t working across multiple mediums professionally. You don’t need to become an illustrator to benefit from this principle.

Experiment with adjacent craft forms as diagnostic tools.

Stuck on a character? Sketch them, even badly. Deciding “where are their hands?” and “how do they stand?” forces specificity that prose sometimes lets you avoid. You might discover your stoic military officer has a nervous habit of adjusting his cuffs—something you never wrote because you never had to make his hands do something visible.

Stuck on pacing? Block it out like a storyboard. Rough thumbnails, stick figures, whatever. You’re not making art—you’re clarifying what happens and in what order. Sometimes narrative problems are structural problems. Visual blocking makes structure obvious.

Can’t figure out your setting’s geography? Draw a map, even a terrible one. Spatial relationships become clear when you’re forced to put distances in relationship to each other.

And maybe you’re thinking: I don’t have time for that. I don’t have the energy to step outside my work and try learning something new.

Fair. Here’s the version that requires zero new skills:

Watch a movie or read a book you love. Then analyze it.

Not as a consumer—as a craftsperson. Ask:

• Why does this scene land?

• What’s the shot composition doing?

• Where does the camera focus, and why there?

• What sensory details does the prose prioritize?

• What gets shown versus implied?

You’re already consuming stories. Start dissecting them. That analysis teaches you how other crafts think about the same problems you’re solving. A well-composed shot in a film can teach you about prose focus. A perfectly paced chapter can teach you about visual rhythm.

The point isn’t mastery of a second craft. The point is borrowing another craft’s problem-solving method to illuminate your own.

I learned 3D modeling and the full gamedev pipeline years ago—purely for curiosity, never intending professional work in games. Understanding how 3D artists think about form, depth, lighting, and camera angles changed how I approach 2D illustration. I started thinking about perspective and sightlines and where the light source lives in ways I’d never considered.

That knowledge didn’t come from studying illustration harder. It came from stepping outside illustration entirely.

Creative Variety as Fuel:

Some people thrive on singular focus. I’m not one of them.

If I write for too long without drawing, my prose gets flat. If I draw for too long without writing, my compositions get stale. I need variety—not as distraction, but as cross-pollination.

This isn’t universal. But if you’re someone who gets restless, who feels like your work suffers when you do the same thing too long, consider that variety might not be procrastination. It might be how your creative engine actually works.

Switching between mediums keeps each fresh. The writing benefits from visual thinking. The art benefits from narrative structure. They feed each other.

When you return to your primary craft after time away, you often see it differently. Problems that seemed insurmountable become obvious. Solutions you couldn’t find reveal themselves because you’ve been thinking about structure through a different framework.

The Practical Takeaway:

Steal ruthlessly from how other crafts think.

Ask yourself:

• If this scene were a comic panel, what would I show?

• If this description were a photograph, where would the camera be?

• If this character were a sculpture, how would they hold their weight?

• If this plot were architecture, where are the load-bearing walls?

Different crafts ask different questions. Borrowing those questions—even when you’re not executing in that medium—teaches you what’s actually essential versus what’s habit.

For me, the lesson was simple: when something matters, zoom in. Cut the environment to the detail that carries weight.

Intimacy requires focus. Focus requires knowing what to cut.

And knowing what to cut? That’s what separates craft from noise.

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Fair winds,
—D.S. Black

Note: This essay analyzes my fanfiction “study in acidity“ written for the 2015 film Burnt. All analysis is focused on craft technique, character psychology, and transferable narrative skills.

Why Fanfiction is a Masterclass in Constraint-Based Writing

Let’s be direct about something the industry pretends not to know: fanfiction is one of the best training grounds for professional narrative work.

When you write original fiction, you can shape every variable. The characters are yours. The world bends to your will. There’s freedom in that, but also the luxury of adjusting elements when they don’t work.

Fanfiction removes that safety net.

You’re working within established constraints: character voices that aren’t yours, dynamics you didn’t create, a world with rules you must honor, and an audience that will immediately notice if you get the characterization wrong. The challenge becomes: can you execute something that feels inevitable within those constraints while bringing fresh technical precision?

This is exactly the skillset required for licensed IP work—games, tie-in novels, narrative design for established franchises. You need to demonstrate you can honor what exists while adding value that wasn’t there before.

So when I wanted to write about the specific psychological dynamic that’s always fascinated me—the intense, almost violent intimacy that can exist between two rivals who are the only true equals in their world—I chose Burnt specifically because Adam and Reece’s relationship already contained that architecture. My job wasn’t to invent it. My job was to complete it.

Let me show you how.

The Foundation: Understanding What You’re Building On

Before you can execute within an IP, you need to understand its existing architecture at a molecular level.

Adam Jones: A self-destructive genius chef who burned out spectacularly, destroyed his career and relationships through addiction and ego, and spent the film clawing his way back to a third Michelin star while battling every demon that made him fail the first time. He’s arrogant, charismatic, and profoundly damaged. His primary pathology: he cannot accept imperfection, especially in himself.

Reece: His former rival and current three-star chef running an immaculate, precise kitchen that’s everything Adam’s chaos is not. Cold, controlled, contained. A scientist who approaches cooking as alchemy—precise measurements, perfect technique, no margin for error. His primary pathology: he processes emotions like data and refuses intimacy that might compromise his carefully constructed order.

The dynamic the film gives us: Two masters who understand each other better than anyone else possibly could, locked in a rivalry that’s really just mutual recognition wearing the mask of competition. They’re the only two people in their world who operate at this level. That isolation creates a specific kind of intimacy—the loneliness of excellence that can only be understood by someone else who’s survived the same altitude.

The film ends with them achieving a professional détente, but it never gives them the conversation. The moment where they actually speak the unspoken things. Where they acknowledge what they are to each other.

That’s what “study in acidity” does.

Section 1: Environment as Character - Building the Cathedral of Silence

Every scene has architecture. Before characters speak, before action happens, you’re establishing the space in which meaning will be created.

Here’s my opening:

The kitchen was a cathedral of silence. Reece’s three-star temple, an hour after the last service, was a world away from the chaotic, screaming forge of Adam’s kitchen. Here, every surface of brushed steel and blinding ceramic was immaculate. The only sound was the low, contented hum of the coolers and the soft, rhythmic shing of Reece’s own knife, a whisper of steel on wood as he meticulously broke down a beautiful, silver-skinned sea bass. It was a meditative act, a quiet conversation between a master and his medium.

What this does:

Establishes Baseline Through Contrast

I’m opening with Reece’s space because Adam is about to invade it. But to feel that invasion, we need to understand what’s being disturbed. “Cathedral of silence” immediately tells you this is sacred space. The comparison to Adam’s “chaotic, screaming forge” establishes their opposition without having to explain it.

Uses Sensory Detail as Psychological Portrait

The “low, contented hum of the coolers” and “soft, rhythmic shing” of the knife aren’t just description—they’re Reece’s internal state made audible. This is a man at peace with his craft. The environment is the character.

Sets the Metaphorical Framework

“A quiet conversation between a master and his medium” establishes that in this world, craft itself is a language. This isn’t decorative—it’s structural. Everything that follows will use cooking as the vocabulary for emotional intimacy.

The technical choice: Establish environment first, let character emerge through interaction with that environment. Don’t describe what people look like—describe how they exist in space.

Why this matters for IP work: In games, film, licensed fiction, you’re often writing characters in established locations. Your job is to make those spaces feel lived in through specific sensory detail that reveals psychology. This is environmental storytelling—a core skill for narrative designers.

Section 2: Subtext as Primary Text - What They Don’t Say

The entire emotional architecture of this piece rests on a principle called radical compression: distilling narrative structure to its core essentials. Traditionally applied to overarching plot, but it scales down beautifully. You can compress a scene, an interaction, a single beat of dialogue until every word on the page is the tip of an enormous psychological iceberg.

This is the keystone of my favorite thing: subtext. Meaning lives in what’s not said.

Watch how Adam enters:

“You’re overworking the fillet.”

The voice was a low, rough thing, stripped of its usual performative bombast, but the words were still a gauntlet, thrown with a quiet, challenging weight. Reece did not look up. He simply finished the cut, a single, perfect, flowing motion, and set his knife down with a soft, precise tap.

What’s happening under the surface:

Adam opens with criticism—his default language. But it’s “stripped of its usual performative bombast.” He’s not here to play their usual game. Reece’s response is to finish what he’s doing before acknowledging Adam’s presence. That’s not rudeness. That’s establishing who controls the pace of this interaction.

Then watch the next beat:

“If you’ve come to poach my staff, Adam,” Reece said, his voice a cool, level instrument, “the answer is no. If you’ve come for a loan, the answer is also no.”

Reece is offering Adam every easy excuse to leave. He’s giving him off-ramps. Because what’s about to happen—Adam asking for an opinion—is so profoundly vulnerable that Reece’s first instinct is to prevent it.

The technical choice: Characters rarely say what they mean. They say what protects them. Your job as the writer is to make sure the reader understands both layers simultaneously.

Why this matters for IP work: Games like Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous or Baldur’s Gate 3 thrive on companions who communicate in subtext. Players need to feel like they’re piecing together psychology through observation, not having it explained. This is the skill.

Section 3: Objects as Emotional Architecture

Now we get to the scallop.

Adam’s brought a single dish in a vacuum-sealed bag. One perfect scallop in pale-green liquid. He’s not asking Reece to collaborate. He’s asking for judgment. For validation that his new work—clean, simple, vulnerable—isn’t a catastrophe.

Watch what Reece does:

Reece was silent for a long moment. He picked up the bag, his movements precise, almost reverent. He cut it open and, using a small pair of tweezers, lifted the scallop and placed it on a clean, cool porcelain plate. He did not taste it immediately. He looked at it. He smelled it. He was not just looking at a piece of food; he was reading a page from his rival’s soul.

This is the eroticism of competence.

Reece doesn’t just eat it. He assesses it with the full arsenal of his expertise. The tweezers. The porcelain plate. The time taken. Every gesture communicates: I am taking this seriously because I take you seriously.

Then:

Finally, he took a small, silver spoon and tasted the sauce. He closed his eyes. The world fell away. There was only the initial burst of bright, clean acid, the sweetness of the scallop, the faint, funky undertone of the fermentation. It was a story. A story of a man who had been to hell and was now, tentatively, exploring the idea of a quiet, sunlit morning.

What this does:

The Object Becomes Metaphor

The scallop isn’t food. It’s Adam’s post-recovery psychology made edible. “Clean. Simple. But there’s a new acid component”—that’s not just flavor description. That’s character arc. He’s rebuilding himself with new elements (the fermented gooseberry vinegar = therapy, new coping mechanisms) but he doesn’t know if it works.

Competence as Intimacy

Reece understands what this dish means before Adam has to explain it. That’s the intimacy. The act of perfect assessment is more intimate than touch would be, because it requires truly seeing someone.

The Verdict as Permission

“The balance is a hair’s breadth from genius,” he stated, the words a simple, clinical fact. “But your finish is apologetic. You’re afraid of the funk. You pull back at the last moment.” He met Adam’s gaze, his own head tilting again, the scientist now asking the profound question. “Don’t be.”

“Don’t be” is two words. But it’s functioning as both craft advice and emotional permission. Don’t be afraid of the thing that makes you different. Don’t apologize for your intensity. Trust your instincts.

That’s why Adam has this response:

Adam let out a slow, shuddering breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. The relief on his face was a luminous and unguarded thing.

He came here for judgment. He got permission.

The technical choice: Find what matters to your characters and let that be the vehicle for intimacy. For chefs, it’s a dish. For soldiers, it might be a weapon. For scholars, a book. The object carries emotional weight because of what it represents, not what it is.

Why this matters for IP work: Games excel at this. Think of every meaningful object exchange in Disco Elysium, every companion gift in Dragon Age. Objects are emotional shorthand. Master this and you can write scenes that feel intimate without ever being explicit.

Section 4: The Memory Gap - Vulnerability as Data Request

The scallop scene was foreplay. This is the actual vulnerability.

“There’s a… gap,” Adam began, his voice a low, rough murmur, the words a quiet, almost shameful, confession. “From that night. Here. I remember the pass… the mistake. The noise in my head. And then… nothing. Just a blank space on the tape.”

Adam has a blackout from his public breakdown at Reece’s restaurant. And he’s asking Reece—the only person who witnessed it—to fill in the missing data. Note “blank space on the tape“—an analog metaphor for an analog thinker. Adam processes memory like he processes cooking: as recorded data with gaps that need filling. Even vulnerability gets framed in the language of his craft.

But watch how Reece processes this:

Reece’s mind, a machine of pure, cold logic, raced. Hypothesis one: a new form of attack. A feint of vulnerability designed to disarm. He ran the calculation, and the result was an immediate, resounding error. The data was too clean. The signal was too strong. The terror in Adam’s eyes was not a performance; it was the quiet, academic horror of a man who has lost a piece of his own mind and is desperate to find it.

This is character psychology doing heavy lifting:

It’s True to Reece’s Pathology

He literally cannot process vulnerability as vulnerability at first. He has to run it as a hypothesis, test it against data, prove to himself that it’s real. Even in moments of profound human connection, he’s a scientist first.

It Shows the Cost of His Defense Mechanisms

That analytical processing isn’t cold—it’s protective. He’s so terrified of being manipulated that he has to verify emotional reality before he can respond to it.

It Creates the Pause

That internal calculation gives us the beat of silence before Reece responds. And in that silence, we feel the weight of the decision he’s about to make: whether to be the keeper of his rival’s most profound moment of failure.

Then watch what he does:

He turned away, the movement a sharp, violent flinch, a physical retreat from a vulnerability that felt more dangerous than any improperly handled blade.

He flinches. Reece—controlled, precise Reece—has a physical trauma response to being asked to be intimate. That tells you everything about how much this costs him.

But he does it anyway:

“I didn’t see you, Adam,” Reece began, his voice a quiet, almost confessional rasp. “Not at first. I saw the look. The posture. I saw the look of a man who has just realized that ‘perfect’ is not good enough. The look of a man who is being murdered by his own standards.”

He finally met Adam’s gaze, and for the first time, his own held no shield, no armor, only the banked, quiet fire of a shared, terrible pathology.

“Because you are one of the few people on this planet who knows what it is to be haunted by the ghost of a perfect dish.”

This is the kill shot.

Reece doesn’t just tell Adam what happened. He identifies the why. He names the pathology they share: the standards so high they become self-destructive. The perfectionism that reads as madness to anyone who doesn’t operate at that level.

And by doing so, he’s saying: I see you. I understand you. You are not alone in this particular form of suffering.

That’s intimacy. Not through sentiment, but through recognition.

The technical choice: Character pathology should be consistent even—especially—in moments of connection. Reece processes vulnerability as data because that’s who he is. The growth isn’t that he stops being analytical; it’s that he chooses to respond despite his terror.

Why this matters for IP work: Companions in CRPGs need distinct psychological frameworks that remain consistent across all interactions. A character who processes everything analytically doesn’t suddenly become emotive in act 3—they learn to express care through their established patterns. This is advanced character work.

Section 5: The Knife - Trust as Object

I could have ended with words. With an acknowledgment of connection. But that would have been too easy, too sentimental, too unlike these men.

So I ended with a knife:

He turned, walked to the lowboy cooler, and pulled out the sea bass he had been filleting. He placed it on the clean steel counter in front of Adam. He then picked up his own personal chef’s knife—a beautiful, well-worn, and deeply personal tool—and slid it across the counter, offering the handle to Adam.

“Show me,” Reece said, his voice a quiet, absolute challenge, “how you would have done it.”

Why this works:

The Knife is Personal

“His own personal chef’s knife—a beautiful, well-worn, and deeply personal tool”—I’m making sure you understand this isn’t just any knife. For a chef, your personal knife is sacred. It’s fitted to your hand, balanced to your style, an extension of yourself.

Offering it to someone else is an act of profound trust.

The Invitation is Multilayered

“Show me how you would have done it” operates on multiple levels:

• Literally: demonstrate your technique

• Metaphorically: show me how you think, how you approach problems

• Emotionally: let me learn from you, let me see your mastery

It’s Framed as Challenge

“A quiet, absolute challenge”—because these men can only accept care if it’s wrapped in competition. Reece can’t say “I want to understand you.” He has to say “prove you’re worth my attention.”

But the underlying message is the same: I respect you enough to learn from you.

It Returns to Craft

The entire emotional conversation happens through cooking. The scallop established that pattern. The knife completes it. Their intimacy exists in the only language that’s ever truly mattered between them.

The technical choice: Your ending should feel inevitable, not surprising. Every element has been building to this—the kitchen as sacred space, the dish as vulnerability, the recognition of shared pathology. The knife is the culmination of all of it.

Why this matters for IP work: Resolution mechanics in games need to feel earned. If a relationship shift happens, it should feel like the natural endpoint of everything that came before. No deus ex machina. Just inevitability.

The Psychology: High-Achievement as Pathology

Now let’s talk about what this piece is actually about under the craft demonstration.

Both Adam and Reece are high-achievers whose excellence is inseparable from their dysfunction. Their obsessive standards, their inability to accept “good enough,” their isolation from normal human connection—these aren’t bugs in their psychology, they’re the features that make them brilliant.

This is the “eroticism of competence” concept: watching someone operate at the absolute peak of their ability is fundamentally compelling. But when you dig into the psychology of people who achieve that level of mastery, you almost always find:

Perfectionism as Violence

“I saw the look of a man who is being murdered by his own standards.”

The standards that drive excellence are the same ones that destroy you. Adam’s breakdown wasn’t despite his genius—it was because of it. The voice in his head that says “perfect or worthless” is the same voice that made him a three-star chef.

Isolation as Necessary Condition

When you operate at that level, you’re functionally alone. No one else understands what you’re chasing or why you can’t just settle for “good.” That isolation creates a specific hunger: for someone who gets it. Who doesn’t need it explained.

That’s why Adam and Reece need each other, even though they’re ostensibly rivals. They’re the only two people in their world who speak this particular dialect of obsession.

Vulnerability as Structural Weakness

High-achievers often develop defense mechanisms that preclude intimacy. Adam uses charm and performance. Reece uses analytical distance. Both are brilliant strategies for avoiding the terror of being truly seen—because being seen means being judged, and their internal judges are already so brutal that external judgment feels existential.

The moment Adam asks for Reece’s opinion on his scallop, he’s breaching his own defenses. The moment Reece offers his personal knife, he’s breaching his.

That’s growth. Not healing, not fixing, not becoming less obsessive—just learning that maybe, maybe, you can let one person past the walls without it destroying you.

The Pathology as Bond

The piece ends without them “fixing” each other. Adam’s still going to chase perfection until it kills him. Reece is still going to process emotions like lab results. But they’ve acknowledged that they’re afflicted with the same condition.

And sometimes, recognition is enough.

Why this matters for IP work: Characters in games like Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous or Disco Elysium aren’t therapy arcs where people heal and become well-adjusted. They’re explorations of how broken people learn to function alongside each other while remaining fundamentally broken. That’s more interesting, more honest, and requires more sophisticated character work.

This is why CRPG romances work when they’re done well: not romance-as-rescue (tired, reductive), but romance-as-recognition. Two broken people who choose each other because they understand the specific shape of each other’s damage. That’s Astarion, that’s Daeran, that’s Lae’zel—companions who don’t get fixed by love, they just get seen. And being seen by someone who gets it is enough.

What This Demonstrates: Transferable Skills

Writing “study in acidity” wasn’t just an exercise in loving these characters (though I do). It was a deliberate demonstration of skills that transfer directly to professional IP work:

1. Character Voice Fidelity

• Maintained distinct psychological frameworks for both characters

• Ensured all dialogue and internal thought matched established patterns

• Found the gaps in canon and filled them in ways that felt inevitable

2. Environmental Storytelling

• Used space, objects, and sensory detail to communicate psychology

• Made the kitchen a character in its own right

• Showed rather than told through concrete, specific imagery

3. Subtext as Primary Communication

• Characters operate in layers: what they say, what they mean, what they’re protecting

• Readers piece together emotional reality through observation

• Nothing is explained that can be shown

4. Object-Based Intimacy

• Used craft (cooking) as the vocabulary for emotional connection

• Made objects (scallop, knife) carry symbolic weight

• Avoided sentimentality by grounding everything in concrete action

5. Pathology-Consistent Growth

• Characters don’t stop being who they are—they learn to connect through who they are

• Reece doesn’t become warm; he expresses care analytically

• Adam doesn’t stop performing; he learns when to drop the mask

6. Constraint-Based Excellence

• Worked within established IP while adding value

• Honored canon while completing what the film couldn’t

• Demonstrated mastery of someone else’s characters

These are the exact skills required for narrative design in licensed spaces. You’re not creating from scratch—you’re working within constraints while bringing technical precision and fresh psychological depth.

Conclusion: Craft as Demonstration

Fanfiction gets dismissed as “not real writing” by people who’ve never tried to execute at this level within these constraints. But if you can make two chefs having a conversation about a scallop feel like the most emotionally intense thing someone’s read all week—if you can honor someone else’s characters while adding depth they never achieved in canon—if you can write silence that carries more weight than dialogue—then you’re operating at a professional level.

This piece exists because Burnt gave me a framework I was obsessed with: the terrible intimacy between rivals who are the only true equals in their world. My job was to complete it. To write the conversation they never had. To make the cooking matter as emotional language.

And in doing so, to prove that I can work in established universes with fidelity, depth, and technical skill.

Whether it’s film, games, or licensed fiction—craft is craft. The principles don’t change. Only the constraints do.

And constraint, as it turns out, is where mastery gets proven.

You can read “study in acidity” here on AO3. If you found this analysis valuable, subscribe for more craft breakdowns.

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Fair winds,
—D.S. Black

When I tell people I’m building languages for my fantasy world, I usually get one of two reactions:

1. “Oh, like Tolkien!” (Yes, but also no.)

2. “Isn’t that just... making up words?” (Yes, but also very much no.)

Here it is: anyone can smash random syllables together and call it a language. Most fantasy writers do. And most of the time, it sounds like someone sneezed on a keyboard.

Kh’zarthyx’ul. Ae’tharion. Zyx’kael.

You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. We’ve all seen it. And we’ve all quietly cringed.

But good conlanging—the kind that makes a world feel real—isn’t about sounding exotic. It’s about sounding inevitable. Like these words have been spoken by real people for hundreds of years, worn smooth by use, shaped by the needs of the culture that speaks them.

So how do you do that?

Here’s what I’ve learned from building two languages for my world (Arunaic and Low Aelhir), informed by a lifetime of being a bilingual, bidialectal weirdo who accidentally became a conlanger.

Step 1: Start With Culture, Not Sounds

Most people start conlanging by picking “cool sounds” and mashing them together. That’s backwards.

Start with: Who are these people? What do they need to say?

Example: Arunaic (The Language of Sailors)

The Aruneans are a maritime culture. Their entire civilization is built on ships, trade, and naval power. So their language reflects that:

• 6+ words for wind (shao = breeze, shaul = gale, shaullue = wind caught in sails)

• Depth/distance is EVERYTHING (linne = shallows, laae = deep, drau = abyss)

• Time is measured by the sun’s passage (fenilasra = high passage/noon, feilasra = waking passage/morning)

The vocabulary tells you about the culture. Aruneans don’t just have “one word for ocean”—they have words for coastal waters, deep sea, drowning depths, and the horizon. Because those distinctions matter to them.

Even their color words are depth-based. They don’t see “blue”—they see where in the water column that blue exists:

• muirrine = sea-blue (the color of shallow or near-surface seas)

• laagerrine = deep loden green (the color of the mesopelagic zone)

• nadirrine = abyssal purple-black (the color of crush-depth)

When an Arunean describes something as muirrine, they’re not just saying it’s blue. They’re saying it has the quality of the sea itself—open, deep, unknowable.

But here’s where it gets interesting:

Aruneans don’t just have “a word for travel.” They have laaonarre.

Etymology:

• laae (deep, beyond the coast) + on (across, beyond) + maare (horizon)

• Meaning: Traveling beyond the coast and across the horizon—into the unknown.

What this tells you about Arunean culture:

To an Arunean, real travel isn’t just “going somewhere.” It’s leaving safety behind. It’s crossing into the deep (laae), beyond sight of land, where the horizon (maare) becomes your only guide.

There’s no single English word for this. “Voyage” is close, but it doesn’t carry the weight of risk, of leaving the known world. “Journey” is too generic. Laaonarre is specific. It’s sacred. It’s what separates a sailor (muirar) from someone who just owns a boat.

This is what good conlanging does. A single word reveals an entire philosophy. It shows you what a culture VALUES—and what they FEAR.

Even their military ranks encode this relationship to the sea:

• Maarendar = Captain (”horizon-commander” - master of the reach)

• Draumeir = Admiral (”abyss-master” - lord of crushing deep)

• Fendraumeir = Fleet Admiral (”high-abyss-master” - master of all depths)

Rank isn’t just hierarchy. It’s how deep you’re trusted to sail, how far from shore your authority extends. A captain commands the horizon, but an admiral commands the abyss itself.

Your language should do the same. If your culture is desert nomads, what’s THEIR word for the moment you leave the last oasis and head into open sand? What do mountain-dwellers call the act of descending into the lowlands? What do your characters call the thing they do that NO OTHER CULTURE has a word for?

That’s where language becomes world-building.

Culture shapes language. Always.

Step 2: Choose Sounds That Fit the Vibe

Once you know WHO is speaking, figure out what they should SOUND like.

Arunaic is:

• Vowel-heavy (a, e, i, o, u dominate)

• Flowing, liquid consonants (l, r, n, m)

• Few harsh stops (no hard K or T clusters)

Why? Because it’s a language designed for speaking on ships—over wind, over waves, over distance. You need CARRYING sounds. Long vowels. Resonant consonants.

Compare that to Low Aelhir (my elven language):

• Sharper consonants (kh, th, zh, hard R)

• More guttural (especially in the Draihir dialect)

• Shorter vowels

Why? Because elves in my world are older, harsher, more warlike. Their language reflects that—it’s harder, more angular, less forgiving.

The sound should match the culture.

Step 3: Build Derivation Rules (So You’re Not Just Making Shit Up)

This is where most conlangers fail.

They make up 50 random words, slap them in a glossary, and call it done. But then when they need a NEW word (which will happen constantly), they just... make up another random word. No consistency. No internal logic.

Good conlangs have RULES.

Example: Arunaic Compound Words

Arunaic builds new words by COMBINING root words:

• drau (abyss) + hessa (horse) = drauhessa (drown-horse, a mythological sea creature)

• shaul (gale) + lue (caught/captured) = shaullue (wind in the sails)

• thea (return) + lua (light/beacon) = Thealua (the Return-Light, the great lighthouse of Theastone)

This means I can generate NEW words whenever I need them. I’m not making shit up—I’m DERIVING words from the system I already built.

This compounds beautifully. Once you have hessa (horse) and drauhessa (drown-horse), you can build:

• hessar = rider, horseman

• drauhessir = of/relating to drown-horse heraldry

• allahessen = horse dressage, martial performance (from allan = graceful form + hessa)

Or take something like bibilausa—a word that combines bibi (cute, small, harmless) + lausa (beast, prey). It means “useless but endearing,” the kind of creature that’s too cute to hunt. It’s the Arunean word for a lapdog. One compound tells you that Aruneans view most animals through the lens of utility, and anything that fails that test is... well, adorably pointless.

Your conlang needs this. Otherwise, it’s just a list of random nouns.

Step 4: Make It Speakable (Or It’s Just Decoration)

Here’s a test: Can you say your fantasy words out loud without sounding like you’re gargling gravel?

If the answer is no, you’ve failed.

Bad fantasy names:

• Kh’zarthyx (how do you even pronounce this?)

• Ae’thalos’kyr (three syllables? four? who knows?)

• Xyl’gothrim (unpronounceable)

These aren’t WORDS. They’re PUNCTUATION.

Good fantasy names:

• Muirrine (myoor-EEN)

• Drauhessa (DROW-hess-ah)

• Thealua (THAY-ah-loo-ah)

You can SAY these. They have rhythm. They have flow.

If your readers can’t pronounce your words, they’ll skip over them. And if they’re skipping over your words, your world-building has failed.

Step 5: Let Your Own Linguistic Background Inform Your Work

Here’s my secret weapon: I grew up bilingual and bidialectal.

• Native Spanish speaker

• Native Midwestern American English speaker (from family)

• Native N/W London English speaker (from childhood friends)

This means I’ve spent my entire life code-switching—flipping between languages and accents depending on context. I can HEAR how languages work. I can FEEL when a sound pattern is wrong.

This is why I can build conlangs that feel real.

I’m not guessing. I’m drawing on a lifetime of linguistic immersion.

You don’t need to be bilingual to conlang well. But you DO need to:

• Listen to how real languages sound (not just English)

• Pay attention to rhythm, stress, intonation

• Study how languages EVOLVE (why do some sounds change? why do dialects diverge?)

The more you understand about real languages, the better your fake ones will be.

The Takeaway

Good conlanging is:

1. Culture-first (what do these people need to say?)

2. Sound-appropriate (what should this language sound like?)

3. Rule-based (how do I generate new words consistently?)

4. Speakable (can I actually say this out loud?)

5. Informed by real linguistics (how do real languages work?)

Bad conlanging is:

• Random syllables with apostrophes

• Unpronounceable clusters

• No internal logic

• Just “sounding exotic” for its own sake

If you’re building a fantasy world and you want your languages to feel REAL, start with culture. Build from there. And for the love of all that is holy, make sure your readers can actually PRONOUNCE your words.

Your world-building will thank you.

Want to go deeper? Next time I discuss conlanging, I’ll break down the elven pronoun system I built for Low Aelhir—where ‘you’ and ‘I’ aren’t fixed identities, but shift based on who’s dominating the conversation. It’s a linguistic nightmare. It’s also one of my favorite things I’ve ever built.

If you want to see that (and more craft deep-dives), subscribe. I post every Tuesday.

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