A flashback isn’t a memory dump. It’s a pressure device. It must interrupt the present, reframe the stakes, and end in a turn. This essay shows how to structure flashbacks that change the story not just explain it.

Praxis is a free craft trainer for fiction. It does not write for you. It installs goal, obstacle, escalation, and turn so every scene ends in a real change. Built from the Not MFA system I’ve used with writers for seven years.

The triangle is the most stable structure in the world. Bridges endure because trusses share load. Roofs keep their pitch in weather because rafters brace in threes. Sailors find speed by tacking between shifting winds and a fixed keel. Musicians stack triads so tension can hold and then resolve. Strength and motion at once. That is the geometry you need on the page.

Subtext is design, not mood. Build it in six moves: set aims, cut the honest line, name the cost, choose a behavioral leak, raise the risk once, and time escalation to a line or a gesture. Use dramatized dialogue, spare monologue, and narratized bridges to keep pressure on the page.

Read The Lottery like a writer and watch ritual and communal complicity turn a town into the antagonist and shape a catharsis you feel in your bones.

Forget what you’ve been told: don’t start with your protagonist. Embrace your villain nature. Start with their opposition. Start with pressure. Start with the thing that makes story happen.

Characters aren’t who they say they are—they’re what they do. In Hills Like White Elephants, Hemingway builds two people whose wants and needs grind together until one breaks and the other is revealed. This is how to design a character arc that ends in rupture, exposure, or both.

There are no plot-driven stories. There are no character-driven stories. There are only character-driven plots. Every decision your protagonist makes leaves a trail—that trail is your plot. This essay breaks down how to build characters whose internal needs and external goals collide, generating narrative momentum and emotional depth that readers won’t forget.

Dialogue in this story is a pressure system: characters want things, and they want them from each other. Every line spoken is an attempt. Every response is either resistance or retreat. There’s no idle talk. Just two people trying to win a scene neither can.

Discover how O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find uses structural torque—a twist in belief built scene-by-scene—to transform plot into catharsis, and learn how to apply it in your own writing.

Scenes don’t carry a story. Sequences do. This lesson breaks down how to structure narrative momentum that escalates and turns—so your story doesn’t just move, it changes.

O’Connor didn’t build scenes—she built a sequence. This breakdown shows how escalating structure, not shock or sentiment, drives the story’s moral turn.

Skilled writers don’t skip sequels. They learn how to compress, disguise, and bury them—so the story keeps moving, but the character still turns.

After the crash, O’Connor gives us one sentence of omission. It’s not mood. It’s structure. A full internal arc buried in restraint—and the choice that sets everything in motion.

The grandmother’s final moment isn’t a plea—it’s a sequel. Emotional reaction, review, anticipation, and decision compressed into a single gesture of grace.

Most writers have never heard of sequels—not the publishing kind, but the structural kind that lives between scenes. This essay breaks down the four beats of a properly designed sequel—emotional reaction, review, anticipation, and decision—so you can stop writing stalled interiority and start building character turns that actually move the story.

Most scenes fail because they’re not designed—they’re just written. This essay breaks down the four structural elements every scene needs to work: a point-of-view character with something to lose, a clear goal, a meaningful obstacle, and an outcome that escalates tension. Includes scene breakdowns from Breaking Bad, The Godfather, and Raiders of the Lost Ark.