When I was about 18 years old, I had assumed somewhat naively that I had already found my favourite sci-fi series ever. Stargate SG1. I was going to grow old with it. I had all the DVDs, and if I ever had children, I would watch it with them when they were old enough. How foolish I was, for I could not believe then that a show such as Battlestar Galactica (BSG) would rob me blind from that assumption.

I acquired the DVD box set of BSG on the cheap, reduced from the HMV sale (a music and film retailer in the UK), where I worked. I was intrigued by the visuals of the case. It looked mysterious and dark. Later that night, I popped the first DVD into the disc drive of my university laptop, and my world was changed.

What had changed?

In most sci-fi, we have a lot of gung-ho characters. Heroes like Luke Skywalker, Jack O’Neill, and Captain Kirk, people who are fallible but very courageous and charming. Sure, BSG even has their equivalent in Captain Apollo, aka Lee Adama, the admiral’s son. A muscular, brave, emotional, and morally defined character who gives us exactly what we might expect. Guns, roaring engines, romance, and bravado.

Suddenly, however, I found myself absolutely gripped by a character who was almost the exact opposite. A scientist, egotistical, philandering, self-preserving coward by the name of Dr Baltar. A man who had been instrumental in the literal apocalypse brought down upon humanity by their prodigal children, the AI robots, the Cylons. Hardly a likeable character, right? WRONG!

This character is the beating heart of the show. And I am going to explain why and what we can learn from the way he was written.

The Curveball: A Character Trope

The best way to understand Baltar, or indeed any character that follows this curveball trope, is to realise that they have a broken moral compass. Many characters, including heroes, are built on moral consistency, but curveballs are filled with dramatic contradictions. Their internal landscape is a melee of fighting beliefs, ethics, traits and contexts. Often, the battle between these juxtapositions is bloody and brutal, which is what makes them so dramatically interesting.

The Core Mechanics.

McKee’s law

McKee is right at the very pinnacle of the pantheon of screenwriting teachers, and he has been instrumental in the education of some of Hollywood’s most famous screenwriters and their success. One of my favourite examples of this is Pixar Animation Studios, which has relentlessly sent its story teams to McKee’s lectures and seminars to build stories that will stand the test of time. If you love Finding Nemo or Toy Story, then this man is part of the reason why.

His first law is all about building dimension in your characters through contradiction, weaving opposing forces right into the code of their identity. However, we must use the word ‘law’ lightly. McKee would be the first to say that he teaches principles, not rules. A rule says you MUST do it this way, whereas a principle is simply the awareness that this has worked repeatedly for a very long time, and that in learning it, you can adapt it and make it your own.

Paradox Versus Randomness with Dr Baltar

So what do we mean by giving your characters contradictions? The simplistic view of this might lead you to think that bolting on random opposing quirks onto a flat character will yield intrigue. It won’t. Contradictions must be fully justified in the character’s story and the fabric of who they are. The reader has to see the internal logic that bridges the opposing traits. In other words, don’t think that making an assassin have a penchant for baking pretty cupcakes will make them fun to read or watch.

Baltar manages to make the bridge between his natural oppositions very understandable and even empathy-inducing. The formula for this success goes as follows:

Core Character Paradox = Their Origin (how they were raised and the life they live) X Their present. (Their role in life, what they do).

Dr Baltar’s origins are thus: he grew up as a dirty farming boy on the agrarian colony of Aerilon, with a simple, rustic family and very few prospects. He spent the years between his childhood and adulthood crafting a sleek, Caprican-accented elite defence scientist persona. Academically trained, highly respected, and a paragon of what it means to be ‘high-scoiety’. All of this was by design, to bury his working-class roots and to pile layer upon layer over the top of his underlying imposter syndrome, class shame, and the deep-rooted insecurity that he is not good enough.

His present is as a scientific advisor who has huge sway over the military and government branches of the surviving human population, where all of the burying he has done threatens to be unearthed through relentless (and sometimes hilarious) conflicts of interest that place him directly between two or more immense powers.

You can see through this example how his negative traits can wage war with his good ones, and how they make perfect sense in relation to his context. His cowardice is a direct result of his insecurity; his self-preservation is a reflex from years of building up a formidable ego. He is not doing anything random as such, because his unpredictable actions are always grounded in who he is.

Empathy

This character of Dr Baltar makes some incredibly poor, and often self-centred decisions throughout the series, often with dire consequences. I mean, literally one of the first things he does is allow a Cylon into the defence mainframe of the 12 colonies because the beguiling Cylon in question had flattered his sensibilities. A charming, high-class, beautiful woman is just the right fit for his new identity, never mind if she seems a bit off and asks too many questions.

So how does a character like this become enjoyable, and even one we root for? How do we turn detestable actions into likeable characters?

For this, we turn to a classic piece of writing advice….

Save the cat

Save the Cat is another very famous guide for storytelling technique, and it gets its name from the principle of making your character ‘save the cat’. Or, in other words, taking a character who may not be morally pristine, such as Dr Baltar, and giving them either an action or a trait that is recognisably vulnerable and potentially wholesome.

Of course, there are not many cats in space for Baltar to save and nurture back to health, but we do see many other instances of his compassion and empathy that serve to balance his more challenging aspects.

The most famous example is when he is tasked with interrogating a Cylon prisoner who has been brutally treated. Starved, allowed no basic humanity, and repeatedly sexually abused. Most of the crew in this instance see her as non-human. A machine that walks the walk and talks the talk, yes, but ultimately she has no ethical value as a robot. However, Dr Baltar challenges this idea, and we see him gently bring this poor Cylon character back from the brink and give her a new life.

This is not the only instance of this heartfelt compassion. He saves lives in action, prays for people, and sometimes even sacrifices his own safety for others. His tendency toward self-preservation cracks, revealing a desperate, almost childlike longing for love and validation through connection.

Vulnerability

Vulnerability doesn’t always have to be shown through actions either. Neuroses is also a particularly effective way to show a character’s cracks and let their vulnerability shine through. Contrast the hyper-masculine heroism of Admiral Adama and Starbuck’s bravado with Baltar’s scared, confused and oftentimes slightly crazy persona. Baltar is often shamed by the storytelling for his lust, his weakness, his cowardice and even his emotional vulnerability. Yet it is this revealing of his imperfections and how he handles them with a tragic lack of grace (such as the scene when he is caught masturbating in his office whilst making love to the woman who lives in his head) that makes him feel achingly human.

As an audience, you are often thrown between feeling empathy, disgust, admiration, disdain and many other emotions when you follow Baltar’s story, and the vulnerability shines through in every moment because of it.

Want Versus Need

This is one of my personal favourite pieces of writing advice, and is best explained, in my opinion, through the book ‘Into the Woods’ by John Yorke. It is simply the idea that a plot is driven by the wants and needs of different characters, with a caveat. Characters will act mostly on their wants for most of the story, and the results of these acts will force the world around them to show what they need.

Dr Baltar, being the curveball that he is, is mostly driven by his desire for self-preservation and the maintenance of his ego. He does not have any idealistic virtues of truth, loyalty, or other such heroic traits, which is often why his actions, driven by his wants, lead to such whiplash moments throughout the story. Shuffling as he does between military ally, Cylon collaborator, Vice President to the colonies (and later president), and eventually religious cult leader. He releases prisoners, lies about people’s identities, and is constantly messing with people’s well-laid plans, all in the name of staying alive.

That explains his wants, but through all these changes, we also begin to see what he needs. Love, faith, connection, a community. And eventually, as his character grows and he works through his many flaws and vulnerabilities, we see development. We see a person change from a somewhat silly, boyish character to a man who shoulders responsibility and who cares about those around him.

In the end, his shifting loyalties as he discovers who he is underneath his shell become the primary engine for the series’ biggest moments.

The B-Side Principle

When we are crafting surveball characters, we are always searching for that theory called the ‘behavioural paradox’, that same juxtaposition of contradictory attributes we discussed earlier. But how do we best show these contradictions to the audience?

FLIP THE RECORD!

Imagine Baltar as a vinyl record.

Side A is where the radio hits live. It is his sleek, public-facing persona that he performs for the world. The celebrated, highly logical scientist-philosopher. He is smug, egocentric, and an atheist who looks down on spiritual beliefs with rational superiority.

But a good storyteller will always have a side B

Side B is the swirling undercurrents of his vulnerability.

So what do we do if we really want to reveal those B-Side traits? Well, turn the record over. Use the plot to force the record player of his life to flip him around and play the music from his other side. With Baltar, he is dragged into playing that side of himself when his guilt causes him to hallucinate the woman in red into existence. A mental projection of his ex-Cylon lover who appears to his consciousness as a deeply spiritual messenger of ‘the one true god’. She drags his deeply buried capacity for spiritual belief and dealing with trauma, screaming and kicking, into the light.

That plot manoeuvre forces the story to unearth everything that makes Baltar tick, and in so doing, reveals to us the depths of his contradictions and our capacity for empathy towards a character that probably doesn’t deserve it.

A word of warning, however.

This technique only works well if you follow this one basic premise. Do not give them a magical makeover. True growth is always about integration, not replacement. A coward should not magically become a fearless warrior by the climax; real humans do not change that cleanly. We are not trying to replace the A side of the record; instead, we want the A side and the B side to begin to work in harmony with each other.

Baltar is not magically transformed into a brave, stoic military commander. He is still the same twitchy, hyperventilating, self-interested egomaniac we met in the pilot. Yet, he has successfully integrated his B-side.

When the final crisis hits, he holds his fear in one hand and a rifle in the other, choosing to stand on the front lines to defend the future of humanity. He doesn’t survive by shedding his flaws; he survives by embracing them, ultimately settling down on New Earth to farm the soil he spent his entire life running from. He remains wonderfully himself, but his inner compass has finally integrated his warring multitudes into a unified whole.

The Workshop

Just like before in my last educational piece where we combined the art of cooking and writing, I would like to suggest an exercise.

So this is where we hand the reins over to you, my fellow friends and writers. Do you have a character that you feel could fulfil this role of the curveball? Yielding unpredictability like a sword that drives the battalions of your plot forward?

Run them through these three steps, and you will have already done much of the heavy lifting when it comes to defining how they will fulfil this trope.

1. Locate their north star: What are their obvious active goals in the story, and why do they want them?

2. Demolish their compass: What is hidden on the B-side of their soul. Introduce a justified contradiction between their origin and their present.

3. Flip the record: Place them in a situation where they must consistently make choices between their opposing sides.

If you can achieve these three basic things, you are well on your way to building a Baltar.

What does Baltar really teach?

Baltar is a complex character, yes. But I think what makes him really special is the mirror he holds up to our souls as well.

We may not be much like him, but we can certainly relate to these warring feelings, conflicted emotions, uncertainty and fears. Making a list of steps for how to build a character like this is an exercise in simplification. Sure, it helps us to understand some of the mechanics, but the real wonder will shine through in our characters when we are able to look into the mirror and embrace our own messy multitudes and scratch them onto our sheets of parchment with as much truth as we can muster.

This new understanding is just the starting point.

Now, dear friends, go write a baller curveball character and make sure to tag me when you do. I would love to read it. And if you have done already, let me know in the comments below and tell me all about it.

All the best 😎🛸👽

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Why the foundations of good cookery are the secret ingredients to writing a story your readers can’t put down.

Growing up, I was fortunate to have a mum who was a chef. She had worked many different cooking jobs and picked up a lot of skills through her career. Initially it was wasted on me, (I was a very fussy child and couldn’t see my way to eating anything that was actually good for me), but as I got to university age, the need to learn some cooking skills quickly became apparent. I started as a deeply chaotic wannabe, much like the Swedish Chef in the muppets. But with each subsequent visit back home, I set about learning something new, and to my surprise, it was never a lesson related to ingredients or flavour. Rather, the basic value of everything I was taught could be linked back to the intrinsic foundational elements of good cookery.

Sadly for my mum, someone else managed to write the book on this first, before she had a chance to put pen to paper. Samin Nosrat’s ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’ is that book, and it is truly excellent at explaining what these elements of good cookery are. But I maintain that my mum was the real trend-setter.

The basic premise of this book and these lessons is simple. There are a few basic levers in cookery which, when pushed or pulled, will take what you are cooking from bland to exciting, from stilted to balanced, and from flavourless to flavourful. I believe these levers exist for writing too, and it is my intention here to point them out and show you how to manipulate them yourself, all through the ongoing metaphor of cookery.

Just as a chef uses these elements to turn raw ingredients into a masterpiece, a writer can use them to turn a sequence of events into a compelling narrative.

Salt - A.K.A - Stakes and Conflict

Salt doesn’t necessarily make food salty, unless you add far too much. It enhances flavours that are already there. You can almost think of it as a volume dial and a clarity enhancer for food. Strangely, the science is quite counter-intuitive. Salt actually knocks back our bitterness receptors, allowing other flavour receptors to be more prominent. Alongside that, salt extracts water from the ingredient, releasing volatile aroma compounds which account for 80% of what we taste through our smell receptors.

In short, it is rather a useful little ingredient. But it must come with a warning. Too much, and food will taste grotesque, like swallowing seawater. Too little, and the food will be bland, like chewing paper.

The salt of storytelling is how you apply stakes and conflict in your narrative. Now, stakes and conflict don’t necessarily change who your character is, but they will bring their true nature to the surface, just as salt brings the flavour of an ingredient to the fore. Without stakes and conflict, a scene is bland. Just two people talking in a room about nothing much. But if you add a deadline, a secret, a threat, a hierarchy, or any number of other things. Suddenly things get interesting.

“Marjorie, I do not wish to alarm you, but for the last few minutes your tea cosy has been ticking.”

Of course, like salt, stakes and conflict have to be judiciously used. Too little and the story becomes slow and bland, but too much, where every moment is a crazy life-and-death situation, it becomes exhausting melodrama that will put most people off. Balance is key.

Heat - A.K.A - Plot.

Welcome to the furnace. Mwahaha! Heat is the great transmuter, and applying heat to your raw ingredients forces a chemical change that produces flavour, texture and all sorts of other fun reactions. It is the element that takes your basic components and turns them into something new; it forces change.

In storytelling, heat is the crucible of the plot. It is the inciting incidents and escalating actions that force a fundamental alteration.

You might easily mistake plot for stakes, or heat for salt to use this metaphor. But they serve different purposes. The salt (stakes) don’t actually change the ingredients. They just bring their best nature to the fore. The heat is the breakdown of the ingredients and their birth into something new. To put it simply, you can’t unbake a cake.

So, while the stakes make them react, the heat of the plot is what breaks down their old worldview and forces them to adapt, learn, and permanently change in order to survive. This is your character arc.

What kinds of heat can you apply in a story?

Heat consists of the structural plot beats that systematically dismantle your characters’ old worldviews and force them to adapt. You can apply heat through threshold crossings that strip away their comforts, like dropping raw ingredients into a hot pan, or through crushing failures that show up the characters’ inadequacies. Heat is the shocking betrayals that destroy trust, the losses of their allies that force them to step up and be responsible, or even a ‘dark night of the soul’ moment where they must sit with their journey so far and realign their compass.

These elements aren’t just threats hanging over your characters’ collective heads; they are friction points that permanently cook them into new versions of themselves.

Fat - A.K.A - Emotion and Interiority

Fat in cooking, such as butter, olive oil, ghee, is an essential component of your dishes, unless you want to have exceedingly flavourless food. It was once demonised as the ultimate threat to people’s health in their diets, but it has subsequently been shown to be pretty essential to health, and very essential to flavour.

To put it succinctly, fat carries flavour. Imagine a person at a water park in a giant rubber ring going around a water rapids. The person is flavour, the rubber ring is fat. Many aroma compounds are fat-soluble; think things like the aroma of garlic or rosemary. They will literally meld with the fats, coating the palate and allowing the flavours to linger and feel satisfying.

In your stories, character interiority and emotional resonance act as the fat in your dish. You can have a brilliantly structured plot (heat) and massive dramatic stakes (salt), but if the reader does not feel a deep, empathetic connection to the characters, the story is dry, like plain boiled rice. Emotion is the buttery medium through which the reader can taste the impacts of the plot; interiority is the lingering weight of a scene’s repercussions, shown through the character’s point of view, that stays with the reader long after they have closed the book.

Acid - A.K.A - Contrast and Reversals

Acid is the brightener. Sometimes when I am cooking, I imagine it like an industrious butler going through and polishing all the grease off the silver so that it can shine. It cuts through the heavy richness of any dish and cleanses the palate (leaving any fingerprints and greasy handprints but a dream).

Have you ever tried to eat a massive bowl of rich, creamy pasta and found yourself struggling halfway through? That is palate exhaustion. Or perhaps something overly sugary like a crepe. A squeeze of lemon sorts it right out. This is why even a glass of cool acidic white wine on the side of a meal is so essential. It wakes the taste buds back up and ensures the next bite is just as exciting as the first.

In narrative terms, acid represents contrast and pacing shifts in your story, alongside shocking reversals.

If your story is entirely composed of heavy emotional trauma that oozes off the page, or dense world-building that is like reading an encyclopedia, your reader will get exhausted. You need acid to cut through it. A lemony sharp plot twist, a sudden moment of vinegary bitter dark humour in a tragedy, or a rapid pivot in the pacing, like picking up a glass of wine and putting down the fork. It prevents the story from becoming a monotonous slog and keeps the reader engaged.

Time - A.K.A - Pacing and Structure

Time is the invisible ingredient; like the swinging of Kronos’ scythe, it is quiet and inevitable, and yet as a chef or as an author, you do get to choose how it feels.

Time dictates exactly how the components of your dish experience the heat, and crucially, it is also the element that allows a dish to rest so the flavours can meld. A high-octane stir fry requires minutes in a super hot wok with a dash of salt, sesame oil (fat), and some rice wine vinegar (Acid), whereas a good curry or a well-made ragu needs hours. I am sure you have all experienced that strange phenomenon where indian food leftovers are eaten the next day, and somehow it tastes even better? That’s time!

In a well-told story, time is your structural pacing. It is the art of knowing when to race forward at breakneck speed in pure adrenaline-fuelled excitement, and conversely, when to let the characters and the reader take a breath from running at full tilt.

A story cannot be all climax. It requires quiet sequel scenes after a massive action sequence to process the consequences before the heat is turned back up. It reminds me of a quote by Alan Watts, which I shall include here.

“In music, though, one doesn’t make the end of the composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest. And there would be composers who only wrote finales. People would go to a concert just to hear one crashing chord… because that’s the end!”

Alan Watts

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The Kitchen Workshop: A Practical Exercise

Much like we did in my last educational piece, when looking at the cinematic techniques of Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece - Jurassic Park.

I want to turn this analysis back over to you and your own work. I invite you to put on your chef’s apron and step into the narrative kitchen. Take a look at your current work-in-progress and identify a scene that feels a bit flat or isn’t quite landing the way you intended. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Does it need more Salt? (Are the stakes too low, or is there a lack of immediate conflict?)

• Does it need more Heat? (Are the characters actually being forced to make a difficult choice or undergo a change?)

• Is it lacking Fat? (Do we truly understand how the point-of-view character feels about what is happening around them?)

• Does it need a splash of Acid? (Is the tone too monotonous, and could it benefit from a sharp reversal or a moment of contrast?)

• Does it need to cook faster or rest for a while? (Has the pacing left the audience bored or has it been so relentless that they are desensitised to the story?)

A Final Thought from the Muppets Swedish Chef.

“Et de eend ooff de dey, coookin’ is ooltimeetely un ect ooff hoospituleety und noorishmeent foor udders. Vritin’ is ixectly de seme; it is un proofoond ect ooff cunnecteeoon. Bork, bork, bork!”

Wait, no! Like the characters in any good story, I too have grown out of my Swedish Chef chaotic phase. So let’s try again...

At the end of the day, cooking is ultimately an act of hospitality and nourishment for others. Writing is exactly the same; it is a slow but achingly beautiful act of connection. You are preparing an experience for your readers to live in and learn from, and by mastering these foundational elements, you can ensure it is a meal they will never forget.

Now, I would love to hear from you. Which of these five elements do you struggle with the most in your own writing? Or, what is a book you have read recently that felt perfectly ‘seasoned’?

Let us chat about it in the comments below.

Do you remember the first time you saw Jurassic Park?

There are few movies as formative for people in the 90s as Jurassic Park. It managed to achieve wonders in the eyes of the 1993 cinema audience, which garnered the film multiple awards and rave reviews. Everything about it was brilliant, from state-of-the-art visual effects (both practical and CGI), to a sweeping soundtrack by John Williams that has become an instantly recognisable motif.

(The latter even managed to launch many successful memes and joke videos, usually involving epic music contrasted with mediocre visuals, or vice versa.)

But probably the film’s crowning achievement is how Stephen Spielberg was able to tell a story, visually, about something very much in the realm of science fiction. A story that has stood the test of time and feels just as visceral and exciting now, 32 years later, as it did on release.

But why Jurassic Park?

The moment I fully grasped the power of this craft, as exemplified by Spielberg, came when I was still very young. I had managed to sneakily watch Jurassic Park, despite how it had been made clear to me by my parents that I was ‘too young’ and that the film was ‘too scary’ for me to watch.

Spoiler alert: They were right, I was absolutely too young.

The next few weeks, I slept terribly. Sometimes I would lie as flat as possible underneath my bedsheets, believing that if I stayed incredibly still and didn’t move a muscle, the Velociraptors might not find me. It is amazing in hindsight how vivid and real a child’s imagination can feel after the lights go out.

What is just as amazing is that the combination of strong visual effects and excellent storytelling managed to create a monster that felt tangible and was very much an emotional reality, changing how my 8-year-old self acted.

This is the very thing I hope to do in my own writing: to use my craft as a writer and artist to make the whimsical feel real for you, my kind readers. So what better way to achieve this than to learn from the masters? But how do we take something as visual as film and bring it into a writer’s toolkit?

Let’s explore.

Jurassic Park Technique 1: Scale & Verticality

Stephen Spielberg made a conscious decision with Jurassic Park to shoot the film in a taller aspect ratio, 1.85:1, to emphasise the dinosaurs’ height and the vastness of the park’s landscapes. Standard widescreen CinemaScope prioritises a film’s horizontal scope. This decision led to a film that, from the very start, frames humans and dinosaurs in the same shot, making the human characters feel incredibly small and overwhelmed. Low angles throughout help emphasise this power dynamic, with multiple instances in which the creatures tower over the humans.

But how can we do something similar in writing? It is not as if changing the font size or the page size will affect how a person perceives a character’s power dynamic in quite the same way. However, you can control scale with sentence structure, using narrative altitude - how far the narrator’s voice is from the action - to create this sense of grandiosity. As well as techniques such as sentence complexity or simplicity.

For example, to create a sense of immense scale, you can use long, complex, flowing sentences with multiple clauses. This mimics a slow, sweeping camera pan across a vast landscape. The narrator’s voice becomes more distant, philosophical, and epic.

To make things feel small, intimate, or personal, you use shorter, simpler sentences. The focus narrows to concrete, sensory details.

Examples from ‘The Strings Of Us’.

With his eyes still closed, he perceived the landscape around him as vast, moving through time and space in a grand cycle of shifting and swirling patterns that went on into infinity. He knew suddenly that the meadow beneath him would come up to him, in just a moment, with the movement of the earth. As long as he stayed true to his place in this swirling mass.

This is an example from my prologue of using sentence structure to convey scale. The first sentence is long and complex, full of grand concepts like time, space, and infinity, mimicking a wide, cosmic shot. The subsequent sentences become slightly shorter and more punctuated, bringing the literary equivalent of the camera back to the character as Que’rup orients himself. The prose is being used to control the narrative zoom lens.

Jurassic Park Technique 2: Contrast (Awe vs. Horror)

In Jurassic Park, you will begin to notice a certain motif when it comes to how the subjects on a screen are presented. In awe-inspiring moments, the shots are wide and breezy, with open spaces. The horror moments are tight and claustrophobic: extreme close-ups, enclosed environments, often shown from a character’s subjective perspective, such as that famous scene of the water in the cup rippling in time with the looming footsteps of the T. rex.

To apply this technique to literature, we can build on what we have already established in the first technique and add extra layers to explore. To enhance our long, flowy sentences that convey space and scope, or our tight, claustrophobic sentences that convey intimacy, we can start playing with diction and setting.

This is one of the greatest strengths of writing compared with film. You achieve this contrast between awe and horror by manipulating your word choice and descriptions of the environments your characters inhabit.

For awe-inspiring moments, you might use words that are abstract, wondrous, and vast: infinity, cosmos, consciousness, grandeur.

The setting can also be open and symbolic, like a verdant meadow under the sky or a wide, endless beach. Even internal environments can have this open quality, with large windows that illuminate a common area, or an atrium brought to life by the gentle, echoing hum of footsteps as people go about their business.

And then for those horror moments, you shift to sharp, visceral, sensory words: hiss, clang, heat, steam, prickling, unbearable. Whilst moving the characters from an open space into a confined one, perhaps a tight corridor, a damaged facility, the space between two hot pipes, or famously, a cramped commercial kitchen, where the sound of metal utensils clattering on the floor can alert the two velociraptors hunting you to your hiding spot.

Examples from ‘The Strings Of Us’.

As carefully as I could, I teetered over electrical wires, shuffled under pipes, and retreated from touching the increasingly warm metal with my chest. The danger of being scalded was only a few centimetres away. The structures around me groaned threateningly. The humidity down here was insufferable. Steam hissed, masking my ragged breathing, and I could already feel beads of sweat rolling down my shoulders.

This section from my 6th Chapter is in direct contrast to the earlier parts of the story. We had established a sense of wonder with one style of language and setting, and then here, we pivot hard, trapping both the character and the reader in a physically and sensorially oppressive environment. The diction supports this claustrophobic feeling with words that imply danger. Instead of stepping over wires, he teeters; instead of crawling under pipes, he shuffles. His breathing is ragged rather than worn. Between these two techniques, you can create a feeling for the reader of being trapped alongside the character.

Jurassic Park Technique 3: Symbolic Visual Cues

In Jurassic Park, there are subtle yet consistent visual rules that are employed throughout the film. Characters descending into danger and ascending toward safety is a nice, obvious starting point, leaning into the ideas of up and down being metaphorical directions for failing or succeeding, heaven and hell, taking a fall or rising above. Another visual clue comes in the form of characters being backlit to signify an important decision.

To achieve the same thing in our written stories, we can use character action & metaphorical staging.

In prose, these symbolic layers come through your characters’ physical actions and their placement within a scene. Something worth thinking about very early in your process, when you are “blocking” or “staging” your scenes.

A character looking down on another can literally represent dominance. You can use geography here to your advantage, such as Juliet in the balcony, or Saruman in his tower. A character physically turning their back can represent emotional rejection as it would in real life. You could even be as on-the-nose as Jurassic Park is and have characters descend into danger and ascend out of it. The physical staging of the scene and the characters will tell the audience a lot about the story’s dynamic.

Don’t forget that these ideas can also be used to show a character’s internal state. Often, when we write in third person, we need to show what is happening inside a person’s head without being told, breaking the illusion of being separate from the character’s inner workings. It could be a simple comment on their mental state, such as a character tidying something or fussing over their appearance, which can represent a desire for control. It could be a comment on a much grander metaphysical aspect of their journey, such as a character walking into darkness, which can represent their moral descent or their soul into the unknown.

Examples from ‘The Strings Of Us’.

Before he could even notice or resist, I jumped into his lap, like a common pet. A few people gasped, and the room stilled... The Heat of all those eyes seemed to momentarily burn into my fur… – It was then that I felt the next newest most unusual thing I’d ever experienced. Elias put his hand on my back and gently stroked me like I was a lap cat.

In this scene from chapter 2, Cas’shya performs an act that is, on the surface, a shocking breach of protocol and taboo. But the action itself is one of comfort, vulnerability, and connection. She physically closes the space between them and makes herself vulnerable to this “deeply distraught giant” to offer solace. Elias’s response, a gentle, stroking hand, is not one of dominance, but of quiet gratitude. The physical action serves to demonstrate the book’s core theme: that connection and compassion can transcend species, hierarchy, and perceived differences. I didn’t need to tell you this because this scene shows it through a single, powerful, and unconventional physical act.

The Jurassic Park Workshop: A Practical Exercise

Now, I want to turn this analysis back over to you. It is time to step into Mr Spielberg’s director’s chair and spin it in the direction of your own stories, to take control of your own scenes. If you have a moment in your work-in-progress that feels a bit flat, or perhaps isn’t landing with the impact you intended, I invite you to try this.

Pick one scene and apply just one of the techniques we have discussed. As an example, if you need to dial up the awe, pull your ‘camera’ back. Use longer, more flowing sentences to open up the space and create that sense of vastness. Conversely, if you need to crank up the tension, push the lens in. Move your character into a claustrophobic setting and focus intently on sharp, sensory details, the hiss of steam, the clatter of metal, the heat of the room. See how consciously manipulating the ‘camera’ of your prose shifts the emotional reality for your reader.

Take every opportunity to let your prose do the heavy lifting, so you don’t make a story that is explanation only.

The Conclusion: A Final Thought

At the end of the day, whether we are directing a film or putting pen to paper, we are all chasing the same thing: emotional resonance. The best writers, just like Spielberg, are intentional architects of experience. They know that every word, every sentence structure, and every physical action is a tool they can use to make the impossible feel undeniably real.

I’d love to hear about the moments that have made you feel this way. What’s a scene in a book that felt so vivid, so visceral, that it was like watching a movie? What do you think the author did to make that reality click for you? Let’s chat about it in the comments below.

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This piece is part of the “Day of the ___ Writer,” an open collab on the daily experiences behind our writing. Post on your publication about your day, and check out our growing mosaic of many lives.

‘Hi’, I say to the sun in the morning.

Ideally that is what happens, I live in the U.K. which is quite far north, and so in the winter the sun might not say hi back for an hour or two yet. The summer is a different ball game, the sun will be up hours before me and is like a jolly parent nudging and poking me to get up. Though, it is fair to say I bring this relationship upon myself through my unruly notion that it is good for me to sleep with no curtains or blinds over my window. I like to imagine that my circadian rhythm will be more stable if I let the sun do the talking. It’s been a norm in my life for so long now that I have nothing to compare it against, except perhaps the weekends I spend at my partners house. She has a better relationship with curtains, and I do notice I tend to oversleep there.

Waking up is a slow process for me. I am not one of those ‘get up like a spring daisy’ types. I like to roll around, hug my duvet, maybe read a bit, and gently rouse myself from my warm little bubble. If I have the time, one of the first pleasures of my day is a morning meditation. Usually about 20-30 minutes, self guided. It has had its ups and downs in terms of the consistency by which I keep this habit up, but by-and-large this has been a staple of my morning since I was a young teen, so getting on for over 20 years now. The value I get from it is immense, and yet hard to describe. I will start by simply saying that the contrast is apparent when I haven’t done this. I become stressed more easily, more reactionary, less focussed. Strangely it is more noticeable only when I have done the meditation, if I don’t do a morning practice, I rarely notice the effect until the next time meditation is brought back.

Following that, I will start getting ready for work, the usual tasks apply: scrubbing the teeth, choosing clothes (usually a colourful shirt), a quick wash and dry, tying my shoelaces, and then out the door we go. My route to work is both busy and bussy. (As in, I get a bus.) The traffic in my area of London in the morning is slow. I am fortunate enough to live in a nice area where people tend to have a bit of extra cash. But this also means people are very enamoured with their cars, and do not like to share their space with others. The roads are small, easily clogged, and with a population of 10 million or so people, this is a recipe for a traffic jam. I am often left wondering why no one has bothered to do some sort of car sharing app. Perhaps they did, but then discovered it was not something people much cared for. Still, I can’t help but wonder how much extra pollution that entitlement causes, and how much time is wasted with people jamming up the roads. There is a plus side though, this means my bus to work takes a while, and so I pass the time journaling and writing. If you see my notebooks, you can see the sections of my journey where the bus has come to a stop etched in the elongation of my letters as my hand slips up the page.

On the odd occasion I also like to take a leaf out of Winnie the Pooh’s book and do nothing. To glance out of the window, admire the sun on the river, watch people living their lives roll by. ‘Doing nothing is something worth doing.’

Work is here, but just before we get there, it’s time to pop into the local Waitrose and get something for breakfast. I always feel a bit fancy when I go in there. Waitrose is famed in the U.K. for being an aspirational supermarket. There are quotes from a blog called “Overheard in Waitrose” that include such sayings as:

• Waitrose have sold out of my favourite Duchy of Cornwall zesty lemon curd so don’t talk to me about your f*****ng problems.

• So I asked him outright - how am I supposed to get homemade hummus out of cashmere.

Luckily, if you are brave enough to explore this odd world of middle-upper class pretentions, you will find range of products that are genuinely tastier, and not actually that much more expensive. My usual would be something bready that I can jam in the toaster when I get to the office. And if I’m feeling extra hungry, some yoghurt, nuts and fruit to stir into a big old bowl of deliciousness.

Work is a small underground office in Fulham, underneath a wine shop that bears our companies name. I used to work in one of those shops myself, and had a great time doing so, but my creative background and general love for writing eventually got me a position in their marketing department instead. A normal day usually includes writing some form of email campaign about a wine or wine collection. Blog posts, social media content creation, scrolling through endless sheets of data, devising strategies, gamifying customer funnels, and generally being a big old wine geek. The upside of working for a wine company is of course the amount of wine we get to sample and study. There are tastings sometimes two or three times a week, and the range is truly excellent. In many ways I have been spoiled by what we import and sell. I worry that if I go back to a life where I have to buy wine at full price, having understood what quality wine is actually like, my life could become a fair bit more expensive.

I should mention at this point that I am not ending every work day tipsy. The other side effect of working in the wine trade is a relative ease towards spitting the wine back out once you have tasted it. I remember when I used to think this was diabolical behaviour. Why would you spit out such a luxury and tasty product that someone has spent a huge amount of energy, passion, and craft putting together.

Well, next time you go to a big wine trade event and see over 100 wines lined up to sample. See how far you make it without spitting. I have tried, and I can’t remember how I got home that night.

Work usually takes up the lions share of my day, as is the case for most people. Nine hours later I will stumble out of my cellar office and hope for a slither more daylight that I can enjoy. Just recently the time the sun sets has gone past 6pm, when I normally finish, and so now my dreams are realised. That said, where I work near Parsons Green is very pretty in all lights and all weathers. A mist can render the green with its old world lampposts to resemble a gothic book cover. In the summer sun people will picnic and sunbathe, meet their friends in the shade of a tree for a catch up. In the rain, the lamps and shop fronts cast an orange glow in the tarmac surfaces of the roads and walkways, shimmering light into my eyes causing me to feel I am walking through an impressionist masterpiece.

The bus back is usually much quicker. I tend to not do too much on this journey as I am usually head worn from the work day. Recently I have taken to playing some of the original game boy Pokémon games. I chose Bulbasaur, naturally.

Arriving home takes me down a very pretty road past a few victorian alms houses which were built to house people who had sacrificed for the armed forces. The houses are built right next to a commons, a piece of land in the U.K. that is designated for public use and for the benefit of all. Traditionally you could even graze cattle there, but of course not many Londoners these days have a spare cow. They are exceedingly pretty buildings, however, and they are a welcome sight each day. A reminder of the great architecture you can find in London, as well as a reminder that I am nearly home.

One of these houses in particular sits opposite a gorgeous old crab apple tree which they adorn with bird feeders of all shapes and sizes. The tree is always bending under the weight of all sorts of species, my personal fave being the Parakeets. They are not native Londoners traditionally, these are parrots that are said to have escaped in the 60s. Some rumours even going as far as saying it was Jimi Hendrix that set them free. Whoever brought them here, they are now fully adapted and are as much a part of the fabric of London as are its many other international residents.

Eventually my estate looms. An ex council estate with great big apartment blocks that were built in the 60’s. My shared house is on the fourth floor, which does give me some rather wonderful views. Sometimes I will throw my head into the residents community garden to see how my veg bed is doing. Currently it is home to beetroots, chard, broad beans, and leeks. I have to say, it looks rather verdant and alive.

Finally home. I kick off my shoes and tend to go up to my room to relax for a while before I do anything else. Depending on the day this can be anything from writing for my own projects and creating art, or it can be just turning off for a while, watching a show or if I’m really stressed out, taking a nap.

Eventually I am called to the kitchen. I share the house with three Italian chefs which means I tend to have the kitchen to myself because they cook and eat at work. The other upside to this is that they are often free to support me in my slow ascent up the Duolingo Italian ladder.

I follow a strictly vegan diet, which means my food is usually quite global in style. Though I have a proclivity towards Asian food and flavours, I suspect partly born of the time I lived in China. I do love to cook, and given the opportunity I will spend many hours in a kitchen making delicious meals. But in a standard weeknight, it is likely to be something much more simple, perhaps a rice dish or a ramen.

And then with the rest of the evening, I tend to devote it to things like my writing. Often I can knock out at least an hour of writing most days, energy depending. Other times, when the inspiration and energy is less available I will read, watch good movies and shows. (I have impeccable taste of course from my tenure as an animator.) I might even treat myself to some pc gaming, though as I get older that becomes more and more rare. Instead you will often find me game-planning my life. Whether that’s looking at my finances, plying around with new business ideas, coming up with new creative endeavours, or working on myself and my growth. These are all things I am deeply passionate about.

Bed is not strictly defined, sometimes I’ll be out like a light by 10pm, others, like an unfortunate night the other day when I stayed up till 3:30am writing, can be later. I used to resent bed greatly. I was a terrible insomniac as a teenager, often laying awake for hours and hours in the dark. It was actually the reason I started meditation in the first place. However, these days, I am a pro at sleeping. Not only can I put myself to sleep with almost zero effort, but I am a vivid dreamer with many fun recurring dreams. It has been a total 180 and I am much happier for it.

This represents a roughly average weekday in my life. I hope you have enjoyed this odd little journey into my mind and life. Maybe some of it seems familiar to you too? If so leave a comment and tell me all about it.

If you would like to try some of my other work, try out my short novella deciduous and evergreen. An eco-thriller and buddy movie style story of a group of children in Edinburgh, Scotland, trying to come to terms with a terrifying prophecy from the past.

Thank you to everyone who has subscribed so far. Your contribution naturally goes well beyond just popping your email in a box and reading my work. The conversations we have had, the critique and feedback I have enjoyed, the palpable sense of community that is evident here in Fiction Substack... I am grateful for all of it!

This, of course, has been no walk in the park…

When you are balancing a full-time job and other time commitments, it is easy to let your daydreams go unwritten. To let your aspirations remain tucked in the desk drawer, out of sight and out of mind. I am determined to not let that happen.

While I have been approaching this 100-subscriber milestone, I have been quietly observing the struggles of everyday indie authors and aspiring writers, myself included. The harsh reality of indie publishing is that getting a book professionally edited, wrapped in custom art, formatted, and sent to the printers costs thousands of pounds upfront. It takes gumption and a lot of capital to pour into your dreams.

Traditional publishing, meanwhile, locks readers out until the book is on a shelf and is notoriously difficult to breach. Standard Kickstarters force creators into a terrifying 30-day ticking clock with no guarantee of success.

What if there is another way?

Joining the Expedition

I am inviting you to help me build a universe.

The Strings of Us serial will remain free to read here on Substack. This is my ‘Lighthouse’ project and it will always guide you to the finished shores of the story regardless of your involvement.

However, today I am officially opening the Cartographers Guild. This is an invitation for the most dedicated readers who want to help fund and develop the book’s creation in real-time.

What do Guild Members get right now? Aside from helping fund the book, members of the Cartographers Guild will receive exclusive access to:

• High-res maps and deep-lore drops about the universe.

• Character profiles and concept art.

• Raw, unedited “work in progress” updates (the messy behind-the-scenes).

• The ability to vote on future story elements and stretch goals.

How It Works (The Leaderboard)

I am opening paid Substack subscriptions, as well as a Ko-fi page, so that if you feel like supporting the progress of the interstellar ship Chrysaora, you can do so on a monthly basis or as a one-off tip.

Here is where it gets fun. We are gamifying the launch. For every contribution, there will be an automatic conversion into ‘Credits’ applied to a public Leaderboard, updated in real-time.

(Every £1 contributed via subscription or Ko-fi tip = 10 Credits). 👇

The Community Pot:

When The Strings of Us officially launches, a percentage of the initial net profits will be placed into a Community Pot. This pot will be distributed to all the Leaderboard point-holders as a massive ‘thank you.’

To be completely clear: Treasury Points have no real-world cash value, and contributing is not a financial investment, stock, or equity purchase. This is a crowdfunded passion project, and the Community Pot is simply a discretionary, post-launch ‘thank you’ gift to reward the people who helped me build this rabbit-filled universe.

What does your support lead to?

I will be running this project very much like a Kickstarter, but without a stressful time-frame. This book is going to take time to perfect, so instead of promising everything up-front, we will work towards goals that unlock one by one as the treasury increases.

Destination 1: The Professional Polish (£2,500) This goal is all about getting the basics right. When we finish this book, we need input from professionals: a developmental editor to point out where the story is going wrong, a copy editor to make sure it reads perfectly, and formatting to ensure that when it hits a physical page or your Kindle screen, it looks stunning.

Destination 2: The Horizon... I have already planned a number of stretch goals beyond this that range from art, add-ons, digital exclusives, and upgrades to the physical book itself. When we smash Destination 1, we will vote together as Cartographers to define which direction we fund next.

So what is the next step?

Your Next Step

Choose your path and help us launch the Chrysaora.

Path 1: Join the Cartographers Guild (Fund the Launch) If you want to earn Credits, climb the Leaderboard, and unlock the behind-the-scenes lore, you can join the Guild in two ways:

• The One-Off Tip: Drop a tip in the Ko-fi Treasury to instantly get your name on the board.

  Ko-Fi

• The Subscription: Upgrade to a Paid Substack Subscription to steadily accumulate Credits every single month. And while you are here, for the first month this link below will give you a lifetime 20% off your subscription.

  The link expires March 25th

Substack Subscription - Special Offer

Path 2: Ground Control (Free Support) If you aren’t in a place to contribute financially, you are still a vital part of this crew! You can help us reach our goals for free simply by hitting the “Like” button on this post, leaving a comment, or Restacking it to share the Strings of Us universe with your friends.

The Recruitment Bounty: Want to climb the Leaderboard without spending a penny? Use your unique referral link to invite your friends to the Chrysaora.

• The Immediate Loot: If you bring in 3 friends, the ship’s computer automatically grants you 1 month of free access to the Cartographer’s Guild (our paid tier).

• The Leaderboard Points: For every single friend that subscribes using your link, I will manually inject 50 Treasury Points into your Leaderboard score, updated weekly. Recruit your friends, fund the launch.

  Just visit my leaderboard page here for your unique referral link.

Thank you for being here. Let’s build something incredible.

Please follow the route below to discover the world of the Chrysaora. Let’s go on an adventure together. 👇🗺️

The Strings Of Us - A serial by Graeme Brandham

A work in progress

The Strings of Us is a Sci-Fi adventure story set in an alternate universe where Humans and Rabbits alike have gained self-awareness.

‘The story follows a historian who abandons his newborn child for a mission he doesn’t understand, a soldier haunted by a past he can’t escape, and a crew of rabbits who can literally adjust their own gravity towards the centre of the galaxy. Thrown together on an impossible ship bound for the stars, they must navigate their own trauma, a dangerous secret, and the growing suspicion that the strings connecting them are part of a much older design. It’s a story about finding your family at the end of the universe.’

Genre: Sci-Fi | Cli-fi | Spiritual Fiction | Magical Realism | Historical Fiction | Whimsy | Alternative Universe.

Act 1

Prologue - The Awakening of the Rabbit.

The fable of the awakening of the first self-aware rabbit reveals for the first time ever, the connection rabbits have to the strings that govern the universe.

Chapter 001 - Elias - Human - Male: testimonial 001.

Elias makes a decision that sets him on an adventure he could never have imagined, but will the cost ultimately be too great to bear?

Chapter 002 - Cas’shya - Rabbit - Female: Testimonial 001

Cas’shya, a veteran of the ‘Genesis’ crew, meets her new colleague for the first time, but what she discovers starts a snowball effect that she fears could sink her reputation.

Chapter 003 - Lysander - Human - Male: Testimonial 001

Lysander boards the ‘Genesis’ for the first time, meeting his new colleagues, as well as a potential new enemy who seems set on helping him relive his awful past.

Chapter 004 - The Fairy Queen

A ghost in the machine, a dancer in the steam.

Chapter 005 - Lysander - Human - Male: Testimonial 002

The tour of some of the ship’s facilities culminates in the Arcturian Water Reclamation Facility. Little does he know, he hasn’t joined a tour; he has stepped onto a gameboard that he doesn’t know exists.

Chapter 006 - Dr Hedghe - Human - Male: Testimonial 001

The Arcturian Water Reclamation plant is in deep emergency, and yet Dr Hedghe does not seem distressed by it. What is he up to?

Chapter 007 - Lysander - Human - Male: Testimonial 003

Lysander is at the centre of a looming disaster at the Arcturian water reclamation facility, the handiwork of a mysterious dancer who seems intent on sabotage. Chapter seven picks up with Lysander scrambling to save the day.

Chapter 008 - Hec’ten - Rabbit - Male: Testimonial 001

Hec’ten has survived, but now he has to contend with a level of secrecy that makes him deeply uncomfortable. What do you do when your job is to follow orders, but your heart is telling you those orders are wrong?

Chapter 009 - Jun’ip - Rabbit - Male: Testimonial 001

Cas’shya is once again caught up in her own head, anxieties spinning, and is using all her wit to try to hide the fact. Poor Jun’ip has the unenviable job of figuring out how to mentor her.

Chapter 010 - Cas’shya - Rabbit - Female: Testimonial 002

Cas’shya, armed with a new perspective, heads towards her first day of work with her new colleague, Elias. The meeting, fortunately, involves one of her favourite rooms on the entire ship, not least because it makes her fur stand on end. The hologram room.

Bonus Content from ‘The Strings Of Us’ universe.

A Christmas 2025 series of advent stories that expands upon the universe of ‘The Strings Of Us’ through a series of artefacts and letters from the entire history of Rabbit-Human relations. Full of lore, sentimentality, Christmas mythos, and festive cheer.

Friends and fellow travelers,

As we approach the Solstice, the ‘Strings’ that bind us grow tight. The nights get longer, the cold sets in, and history tells us that this is when help arrives.

We all know the myths. The red suit, the sleigh, the workshop. But in the world of The Strings of Us, myths are simply history we have forgotten.

To read ‘The Strings of Us’ Follow the link here for the prologue to discover more about how Rabbits and Humans have evolved alongside eachother.

This December, I am embarking on a 25-Day Writing Challenge: The Aurora Archives.

I will be publishing a daily ‘archived letter’, a piece of flash fiction in the form of a letter from a child (or adult) who experienced a miraculous, unexplained kindness during the darkest days of winter. These letters will hint at the true origins of the legend: a secretive, gravity-defying order of guardians who have watched over humanity for centuries.

But I cannot map history alone. I need you to be my eyes and ears.

I am not asking you to write a story (it’s December; we are all tired!) I am asking you to be the Muse.

The Mission

I need you to drop a comment below with a sighting coordinate. I will take your prompt and write the letter myself, crediting you as the historian who uncovered it.

Please provide just three things:

1. A Time: Any year in history (e.g., 1847, 1920, The Bronze Age, Last Tuesday).

2. A Place: A specific location, preferably one experiencing a “long winter” or a moment of need (e.g., A lighthouse off the coast of Scotland, A Dust Bowl farm in, A crowded tenement in New York, A Roman Temple to Bacchus).

3. A Witness: A name and a very brief situation (e.g., Thomas, age 8, who lost his favorite toy in the snow OR Annie, age 12, who is hungry and waiting for her father to return from sea).

That is it.

Give me the foundation, and I will build out the encounter. I will find the ‘Rabbit’ in the details.

Example Prompt:

1941. A basement in London during the Blitz. Sarah, age 6, who is scared of the noise.

Leave your “sighting” in the comments. Let’s see how far back this history goes. The Archives open on December 1st.

The signal is strong. Who is listening?

Great question!

One of my main pillars is…

History. The past has always been a source of fascination for me. You don’t have to go far back in time to start noticing changes that slowly turn the world you know and love into something more akin to an alternate reality. Just thirty years ago, people got by without things like the internet, google maps, amazon deliveries, (or even worse, without Substack!) Go back another one-hundred years and you lose cars, to be replaced instead by horses or a long walk. Another thousand and, for me as an Englishman, you may as well be roaming around in the real-life version of Westeros, minus the dragons and the undead spooky snowmen.

It’s no wonder that a great deal of my work leans into this love for history, but for me, it’s not just about being transported. It’s about how history ‘transcends’ time. It leaves a mark on the canvas of the present world, like innumerable brush strokes added by the hand of every person who ever perselled, every thought ever thunk, every moment of entropy that has ever entrooped. Everywhere you look, right now in this moment, is the story of artwork made from the paints of the past.

This theme, of history as a living, breathing presence that you can quite literally touch in the world around you, is an obsession. I love when objects, patterns, and people can bring to life a past that you yourself could never have experienced, but can in some way commune with.

I explored this literally in my story, “Wine, Wind, and Whipping Sails, part 001” which was inspired by a real 1799 Madeira wine bottle. I wasn’t just interested in the date; I was interested in what that bottle might have seen.

“The little old man encourages you to lean in closer, and as you do, you start to hear a different world emerging from the shelf. As if the world you currently inhabit is having the volume lowered and is being cross faded with an entirely different soundtrack... You get closer. You smell the sea. Suddenly, you’re there!”

It is also a major part of my two main serials.

‘The strings of us,’ and ‘Deciduous and Evergreen.’

But I am certainly not the only one charting this territory. This theme of the past echoing in the present is one of the most magical things about storytelling and I have already had the good fortune to stumble upon other authors who play with this idea.

Here are a few fiction, and non-fiction pieces from other writers on Substack that capture this feeling perfectly.

Five brilliant examples:

Where history, in a mystery, is implied through the found objects left behind.

The Flannan Isles Lighthouse:

“Abandoned buildings where tragedy has struck always bear evidence of final moments—the overturned chair that tells of haste, the half-written letter that speaks of interrupted thoughts, the open door that suggests flight or pursuit. But Moore found something different in that December kitchen: order maintained until the very end. The kitchen had been tidied, pots and pans cleaned and stored in their proper places.”

Where history is brought to life through the presence of a remembered, and sometimes forgotten object.

4:44 Series: the edge of the rooftop:

“The scarf smelled like childhood—like crisp winter mornings and the faint tang of wood smoke. It smelled like evenings spent giggling on the couch with his younger brother, wrapped in blankets as they watched their favorite childhood movie for the hundredth time. It smelled like the fight they’d had over the last cookies, their voices loud and indignant. It smelled like the way to school, walking side by side, their breath visible in the cold air, their backpacks heavy with books as they took the forbidden shortcut across the fields by the silo. It smelled like their shared fear of the basement, the way they had challenged each other who could stand on the stairs leading to it the longest, staring down at the red light of the heater that glowed in the darkness like a single, unblinking eye.”

Where history is explored, not as a fixed storyline, but as something fluid, traversable, changeable. When history and the present blur.

The Flames of Redemption: A D’veen Tale:

“No matter, that is not the story I have for you today. Today, you are going to remember what you did, and maybe, just maybe, find redemption for your tarnished soul.”

The surface of the sphere shattered into pieces that shot outward. Strange runes glowed on each of the metal shards as they slowly orbited a glowing ball of light in the center. It crackled and sparked as unfathomable energy coursed through it. Like a star, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.

“It’s time to remember, Sir Reinhart Brisbane. This is your story.”

Where history is subverted, and the past, as felt from the present, becomes the emotional heart of a story. (I have been careful to avoid spoilers here, because this short-story deserves to read from start to finish for the full emotional clincher)

A Time for Every Soul - Part 2:

On my way out, I spotted a little display next to the door. It was a glass case with a few ancient pots and pans from the region. In particular, a large-bellied metal pot. I walked over to it, heart beating fast, eyes filling with tears.

Where history is worn by people in the present as a way to symbolise their beliefs, their prestige, their worldview.

Stolen History, A Cai Williams Short Story:

“She would rather be buried in books in the library, or out in the field on a discovery site than interact with those kinds of people. If she was being honest, any people, really. One of the great things about ancient civilizations and cultures is that they never tried to seduce you or lie to you”.

So what have we learned?

History, as it’s felt in the present day, is as vast and deft as any fantasy book, and often informs the very best of the fantasy genre, even when the history is newly created by an author. History is a web that stretches backwards in time. Yes, history is non-repeatable, except perhaps within our imaginations, but it is felt through every strand that connects us. Even now, look out your window and catch the light from the sun, hear the sound of a passing car, feel the cool breeze on your face. Every event has its origin in the space left behind by time, and it all connects to you somehow.

Now, I’d love to hear from you.

I have shared five examples of how history can be explored in writing, through the medium of five fantastic authors whose work I have come to admire. But there are certainly more? How are you incorporating the past, as it’s felt in the present, into your next masterwork?

I’m fascinated to hear about your projects in the comments.

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I have been on holiday for the last few weeks, and while I have been doing a bit of writing in my notebooks, I have also found myself getting re-addicted to a show that has recently found its way back onto my usual streaming service. Downton Abbey. (A.K.A The show I never expected in my life, but the show that I am eternally grateful for it being there.)

I am almost certainly not the only person in this wide world to have sat down with the intention to watch a single episode of a show, only to find myself, four hours later, blurry-eyed and completely hooked, wondering where the time went? Not to mention, suffering that secondary fear. The one that comes from knowing you might have borrowed a bit too much fun from tomorrow with your now apparent lack of sleep looming.
That addictiveness of a bingeable TV show or book, that compulsive need to see what happens next isn’t an accident. It’s the result of masterful narrative engineering.

And if you were to ask me, (or as the premise of this article might suggest, ‘if i were to tell you’), few narratives have ever built a more elegant and addictive narrative machine than Julian Fellowes did with the first three seasons of Downton Abbey. Beyond the beautiful costumes and witty dialogue, the show is a masterclass in structure. As a storyteller, I’m fascinated by how these worlds are built. So today, I want to lift the bonnet on the vintage Downton engine, to see how the ‘aul cogs turn’, and find some practical lessons that we can use in our own stories.

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The Long Game: The Unanswered Question

The engine of Downton Abbey‘s first season is ignited by a single, catastrophic event: the sinking of the Titanic. This historical disaster is the inciting incident that kills the male heirs to the fictional Downton estate and creates the season’s central, overarching problem. Due to a tricky legal arrangement called an “entail,” the entire Crawley fortune, home, and title can only be passed to a male heir. With three daughters, Lord Grantham must find a distant, unknown cousin to inherit everything.

This “entail crisis” is the story’s spine. It poses a couple of simple, powerful questions that hang over every single episode:

• How will the Crawley family, and particularly the eldest daughter Lady Mary, secure their future?

• Will the modern audience get to see a pay-off that aligns with their sensibilities on modern women’s rights, or not?

This single, unresolved problem provides the propulsive momentum that pulls us from one episode to the next. It’s the long-term promise the show makes to its audience: keep watching, and we will eventually give you the answer.

The Secret Sauce: The Weekly Payoff

A long-term question is great for creating suspense, but it can also lead to frustration if the audience has to wait too long for a resolution. This is where Julian Fellowes’s genius comes in. While the entail crisis simmers in the background, each episode introduces, and largely resolves its own smaller, emotionally charged crisis.

The most famous example from season one is the scandal of Mr. Pamuk in Episode 3. A handsome Turkish diplomat seduces Lady Mary, has a heart attack, and dies in her bed. (Golly). The immediate, thrilling problem—how to move the body without causing a scandal—is resolved by the end of the episode. The audience gets a full dose of suspense and a satisfying resolution.

But here’s the trick. The resolution of that short-term problem creates a new, even bigger complication for the long-term story. By successfully hiding the body, Mary now possesses a ruinous, ticking-time-bomb of a secret that makes her “unmarriageable,” if it were to be revealed, directly threatening the family’s main goal of finding her a suitable husband to solve the entail crisis.

This is the mechanical secret to the “binge factor”:

Each resolution is also a new hook. The audience feels the satisfaction of a story being completed, but that very completion raises the stakes for the bigger story they’re already invested in, creating a powerful chain reaction that makes it almost impossible to stop watching.
Have you ever seen those viral videos where people wrap an elastic band around a watermelon, one after the other, until the watermelon explodes?
This is the story equivalent of that.

The Human Element: Conflict as Character

A story’s structure is its skeleton, but its characters are its heart. Fellowes masterfully explores the show’s complex themes, both as they would have been understood historically, as well as being cogniscent of a modern audience’s sensibilities regarding these themes. This is achieved by having characters that embody opposing worldviews, put together in unforgettable pairings, who eventually work together and come to some sort of synthesis.

The best example is the rivalry between Violet, the eternally witty Dowager Countess, and Isobel Crawley, the middle-class mother of the new heir. Violet is the champion of tradition, inherited authority, and the old aristocratic order. Isobel on the other hand, represents the modern world of logic, meritocracy, and social reform. Their initial relationship is one of mutual suspicion and brilliant, banter-fuelled clashes, and the writing exemplifies that. In particular, some of the one-liners that you get from Violet serve both as comedy relief, as well as a great way of communicating her inherited privilege.

Examples include:

• “What is a weekend?”,

• “Why does every day involve a fight with an American?”,

• “No Englishman would dream of dying in someone else’s house,”

• “My poor niece never uses one word when twenty will do”.

• “Don’t be defeatist, dear. It is very middle class”

• “First electricity, now telephones. Sometimes I feel as if I’m living in an H.G. Wells novel”.

Please forgive this brief foray into the quotability of the dowager countess. Aside from being an excellent illustration of her class naivety, I also love them for their own comedic merits.

But the story doesn’t just leave them in opposition. In a colourful scene at the village flower show, whilst many covert glances are shared, Isobel points out that Violet wins the prize for the best rose every year out of social obligation, not merit.
Apparently it pays to be everybody’s landlord during a flower contest.
Violet, after a moment of self-awareness, uses her traditional authority to enact Isobel’s modern principle: she publicly awards the prize to the deserving runner-up, correcting the injustice while remaining fully in control.

This isn’t about one side winning; it’s a synthesis. It shows us, through action, that tradition and modernity don’t have to be enemies. It’s a nuanced, hopeful, and deeply human resolution, far more powerful than any simple debate could ever be.

This to and fro happens across many of the characters. Mr Carson’s traditional approach is a fun counterbalance to some of the more liberal servants who share playful jabs with him. The middle sister Sybil acts as a modern progressive, dating young Irish chauffeurs and speaking up about women’s rights, whilst her older sister maintains a lofty heiress cadence. Old Mrs. Patmore’s no nonsense working class perspectives, embedded from years of servitude, often clash with her youngest worker Daisy’s fresher, more naive perspective. We eventually see the same resolution with Matthew Crawley and Robert Crawley in the ways they view how the estate should be managed. The traditional aloof approach clashes head on with the middle class workers mindset, but in the battle, they eventually find each other and synthesize to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

The key point is that none of these seeming contradictions are ever allowed to go too far in one direction or another. Julian Fellowes weaves narratives that give every character, and by proxy, every viewpoint, space to breathe, come alive, and be heard.

Vitally, these opposing views create more mini hooks, and mini stories that are successfully resolved within an episode or two. Each conflict seems to have a bearing on the larger story at play, and will feed into the viewers expectations of what might happen.

The Workshop: Your Turn as Narrative Architect

So, how do we apply this to our own work? Let’s put on our story cartographer’s hats and use these principles to map out our own writing. Take a look at your current work-in-progress and ask yourself:

1. What is your “Entail Crisis”? What is the single, overarching, unresolved question that will pull your reader through the entire narrative?

For me this is the question of whether my main character, Elias, will ever be re-united with his daughter, whom he had to abandon at birth.

2. What are your “Mr. Pamuk Moments”? What smaller, self-contained crises can you introduce along the way? Crucially, how can the resolution of those crises raise the stakes and create new complications for your main plot?

Personally for this I am exploring an elevation of the ‘Journey’ trope, where a group of people locked into a journey together slowly raise the stakes through their actions. In my story this includes acts such as a sabotage, a mutiny, a dark secret yet to be discovered, and many more smaller stories that not only raise the stakes for the main plot, but also raise the stakes for the characters as well, pushing them to the edges of their abilities and feeding into that engine of the bigger story.

3. Who are your “Violet and Isobel”? Instead of just stating a theme, can you embody its opposing sides in two compelling characters and let them clash, challenge, and ultimately, learn from each other?

Again, in my own work, this is exemplified by the clash between Human and Rabbit culture, but is not limited to that. People are naturally different, and will often have opposing aims, beliefs, strengths, and limitations.

Thinking of your story not just as a sequence of events, but as a symbiotic machine of interconnected parts, is the first step toward building a narrative that is as satisfying and addictive as Downton Abbey. If you know your novel keeps people up to the early morning, sleepless and bleary eyed, then you have mastered this.

Great stories feel magical, but they are built with elegant, purposeful design. By engineering a plot that delivers both long-term suspense and regular satisfaction, and by exploring our deepest questions through the conflicts of vivid characters, we can create worlds that our readers will not just visit, but won’t want to leave.

Now, I’d love to hear from you. What’s another TV show you feel is a masterclass in narrative structure, one that hooked you and refused to let go? I am always excited to explore a new piece of beauty, genius or profundity. (Just no horror please, I suck at horror).

What happens to the human imagination when an answer to any question is only a keystroke away?

The internet in my houseshare is down. A very modern inconvenience that feels, counter-intuitively, like a gift. In the forced silence of the internets quiet, stripped of the constant stream of information, a more interesting question surfaces: what happens to our minds when the connection to that constant stream of digital knowledge is never broken and remains omnipresent?

The biggest faux pas of having the internet is that you become addicted to having access, through this portal, to a vast library of knowledge, people, and connection. Addiction comes in the need to download wisdom, knowledge, community, or entertainment in an instant. It’s like being an explorer and having the entire map mostly revealed to you already! Sure it is informative, but it doesn’t encourage us to venture forth.

But what happens when you don't immediately have the answer to your questions, or you don’t immediately have the means to be momentarily entertained.
Well, you find your own entertainment, you mull over the immediate problems confronting you, be it a question, or simply boredom. You stretch your mind as you consider how to solve your issue the old-fashioned way. By using your skills of logic, intuition, creativity, and play.

My personal life, thankfully, has many hobbies and interests in it that are distinctly analogue and don't require the internet (or at least, lots of the Internet… The irony of sharing this article online is not lost on me). Even originally writing this thought-piece by hand in my notebook is one such analogue activity. Something literal and physical that helps to ground me.

It is both humbling and interesting to realise that it could actually be good for us to NOT have that access to infinite knowledge. To essentially be slow, bored, or frustrated. It shows us the limitations we have as humans next to our technology. But it also stretches us.

A brain, to be most alive, effective and firing on all cylinders needs to be stretched like a muscle in order to grow. Studies are showing that the internet, social media, and now AI are curtailing that. It causes me to wonder, what actually happens to us as individuals if we do have all the information at our fingertips? Is it that we just find new complexity to solve? Do we start to chew on thoughts and ideas beyond the scope of what is usually understood with a simple answer, immediately provided? Perhaps we become more poetic and philosophical. Perhaps we invent new languages and ponder the meaning of the universe.

Part of me doubts that will be the norm. Especially because AI will be able to feed us an array of good and bad answers to even these more profound curiosities. I've had chats with AI about everything from character motivation in a film I've just watched, to quantum physics, and have, on occasion, attempted to ask of it the deepest spiritual questions. I'm often delighted by the discussion, only to realize later that my natural tendency is to accept its eloquent responses not just as interesting ideas, but as insights into objective reality. That subtle shift is where the danger lies.

Let's also remember that brains are a muscle, they are not hardware. A computer can take in information, store it, recall it, and have an ambient (rather than focussed) aperture on the vastness of the available data. A brain cannot do that, it tends to glean new information in a linear, time-based fashion. We read a book line by line, and for the brain to be more effective at this line by line information harvesting, it needs to be exercised. A computer is different. It's ambient aperture to data is like being able to read a whole book in one fleeting glance.

So rather than AI elevating us from the mundane problem solving in our lives that we generally abhore. It instead dulls our need for mental exercise so that our overall capacity for creativity, thinking, logic, puzzle solving, is slowly reduced. How then do we use AI safely?

Sci-fi has been wrestling with this for decades. In Frank Herbert's Dune, humanity fought a great war against 'thinking machines' and thereafter forbade the creation of a machine in the likeness of a human mind. Their solution was to develop human potential instead, creating the Mentats—humans trained for supreme logic and memory. While a galactic war might be dramatic, the principle is the same: how do we use our tools without letting them use us?

I believe to use AI somewhat safely, to preserve our intelligence and creative voices, our using it has to be in the form of a super advanced assistant rather than a super advanced navigator. Imagine you are sailing a little jolly boat. By all means, have someone there to help you understand the stars, the currents, the way you have organised the sails. But keep a grip on the rudder, and manage the sails yourself. In short, you kind of need to do the work first, and maybe then you can reflect on it and be guided on how to streamline with the AI afterwards.

So for example, if you are writing a book, rather than asking it for ideas, come up with some ideas first and then have a the AI ask you questions about them, so you can reflect. The subsequent back and forth session with the AI as you answer these questions will be a reflection of you, not it. Ask it to take on the role of a conceptual writing partner and let it pick at your thoughts. Together you can riff on the new patterns that arise from these interactions, and it can act as a sounding board for what you eventually conclude. Importantly, by asking the AI to prompt you, rather than you prompting the AI, you are working with your self as reflected in the mirror of the machine. Yes, it still sounds dystopian, but at least its not the other way around.

But outside of this, we also need to embrace not knowing things and being bored sometimes. For it is in that silence that the mind will wrestle with the material it has. Not only coming up with potentially unique solutions. But also exercising itself in the process. That mental exercise and creativity, found in the absence of the noise emanating from the great map revealer in the screen is what will keep us sharp, witty and strong.

So what if we don't stay sharp, and we submit entirely to AIs ability to fast track our working process? I fear we become mental sloths, outsourcing our thinking until our own prowess deteriorates. The stakes are nothing short of existential. The great computer becomes more powerful as the common human becomes less able. For ourselves, and for the children who will inherit this new world, we have a duty to learn how to navigate it safely.

This is a tension I'm constantly feeling in my own life and work. The line between a helpful tool and a mental crutch is a fine one, and I believe that talking about it is the first step toward charting it wisely. There are many facets to this conversation that go well beyond the scope of what I have mentioned here. Ethical considerations, environmental ones, political ones. But for now, I am starting with the most basic question of all. How do we remain creative and human?

Now, I'd love to hear from you.

How have you felt this in your own life? Have you had a moment where a tool like AI felt like a helpful 'assistant,' or a moment where you worried it was becoming the 'navigator'?

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Sometimes, movies resonate with you at a certain point in your life because they reflect where you are in your own life. For me, Surfs Up, was one such movie. As a teenager, I had recently transitioned from being a very geeky, academic, and extremely driven young man, to a fun-filled, relatively popular student of the present moment, with an appreciation of what it meant to have fun.

To have a movie explore that transition and play out the dynamics of this internal change, both positive and negative, on the big screen, was a very cathartic and affecting experience. The movie became an example for me of everything I had learned so far, and a message to the person who I wanted to continue to be.

Eighteen years have passed. I am now an adult in my mid-thirties. This progress into adulthood has worn down some of those immediate messages that I gained from the movie. Being present-moment focused and mindful is still a big part of my life, but the drive to succeed, the fear of what happens if I cannot be successful, and the slow loss of my capacity to simply have fun without feeling like I should also be achieving something—these are all manifestations of the pressure the adult world places upon us.

So you can imagine how it felt when a more or less forgotten movie from my formative years popped up on my streaming service one evening. I immediately watched it, and it affected me perhaps more now than it did back then. I am not shy to admit that I shed more than a few tears and shed more than a few years. Tears for the child in me that has slowly been lost, and for the message in the movie that served as a poignant reminder that, yes, there is more to life than the grindstone.

No doubt there are many movies that tell a similar story, with a character arc that follows the same basic pattern toward an emotive and affecting ending. However, I chose this film partly because I had such a childhood connection to it, but also because it's important to show that even in the less celebrated examples, there are gems to be found and lessons on story-craft to be learned.

The Existential Fear of Sorting Fish

So let's analyse this story and what helps it to culminate in such an emotional climax.

We start in Cody's ‘normal world’: Shiverpool. An antarctic icy wasteland populated by shivering penguins who live a simple and practical life. They catch fish, sort fish, eat fish, and raise young. That is the way of life. Cody's brother, Glenn, exemplifies this worldview. He is resistant to anything outside of this world. His pride and sense of purpose are intimately wrapped up in being a solid member of this community, a ‘good’ son to his mum, and nothing else.

Cody, by contrast, is a renegade and rebel. He helps out with his chores and works at the fish sorting depot to help out, but the rest of his spare time is spent surfing. A habit that makes him a bit of an outcast to his community and an enigma to his seemingly long-suffering mum. We learn this habit was brought on by a visit from a famous surfer, Big Z, who came to Shiverpool and showed Cody that there was an alternative to the life he currently leads. The way to find that alternative is to be the best surfer he can be and to win a surfing championship. This serves as ‘the call to adventure’ part of this hero's journey.

In short, Shiverpool and his brother represent a mindset: ambitionless, cynical, and repetitive. Big Z represents the opposite: opportunity, adventure, success. This contrast gives Cody his energy and drive.

Cody’s goal is not just "winning a surfing competition"; instead, he sees surfing as an existential escape. His tunnel vision is born from a relatable fear: "If I'm not the best, I'll be stuck sorting fish forever." Cody's fear for a life he does not want, but that he feels is being forced upon him by virtue of his place in the world, makes his initial extremity, his arrogance, and his dismissiveness of Shiverpool understandable rather than unlikable. This clever use of relatable fear transforms Cody from a character we dislike to a character we root for. His character flaw comes from a place we can empathise with. We understand the desperation and fear driving him.

The Master Teaches the Student (and the Student Teaches the Master)

The mentor is a foundational role in story theory. This is most notably shown in the hero's journey method used to great effect in many of the world's most cherished stories, such as Star Wars with the character Obi Wan Kenobi. Surf's Up is no different, though the way the mentor aspect of the narrative is shown subverts some of the more usual rules, such as the mentor role being spread out amongst a number of different characters: the down to earth Big Z, the ever nurturing Lani, and the simple perspective of Chicken Joe.

There is a set of scenes in the middle of the movie that really captures this distributed mentor approach and uniquely, accomplishes it in a surprisingly relaxed and low stakes way that focuses more on character and less on external circumstances.

Let’s build a surfboard!

The first scene in this sequence starts almost immediately after Cody suffers his first big challenge: failing at a one to one surf off with the main antagonist, Tank Evans. We find him forlorn and alone, having rejected a temporary sanctuary. When the person who represents this sanctuary returns in the form of Geek (aka Big Z) and offers to help Cody build a surfboard, we begin this mentor-led set of new challenges.

On the beach, we get a typical mentor and student scene where Geek tries to teach Cody how to carve a surfboard from wood. The challenge, of course, is that Cody is impatient, has an ego, and doesn’t want to listen. This exchange is dealt with in a comedic way that helps make Cody’s frustration a little more reasonable, with Geek being overbearing and controlling as a teacher. As you might expect, Cody’s board is a disaster and breaks as soon as he tries to use it. This causes a rift in the student-mentor relationship and acts as the ending to the second challenge, which, again, Cody fails.

The next sequence is where we are introduced to one of Cody’s next mentors: Lani. Having stormed off after failing to make a decent surfboard, Cody crashes into Lani, causing her to drop the stack of clams she was intending to deliver to Geek. Lani, upon learning that Cody has managed to get Geek to the beach—a result that she has spent the last ten years trying to achieve—delightedly invites Cody on an adventure with her. This triggers the next mentor moment and the third challenge.

Taking a leaf to use as a makeshift sled, Cody is sent spiralling into a labyrinthine slide that takes him through the volcanic heart of the island alongside Lani. Their contrast is initially stark, with Lani having a great time and Cody trying his hardest to resist the fun of the slide. However, after prompting by Lani to let go of trying to control everything and to just go with it (echoing Geek's lesson with the surfboard), Cody finally lets go, finds that he starts to enjoy it, and what’s more, it becomes incorporated into his ability to surf. He begins to enjoy the slide and treat it like a giant wave that he is able to thoroughly own. In this scene, he starts to show signs of incorporating some of the lessons he is being taught by his peers, and he acknowledges the fact by confessing directly to his previous bad behaviour.

It is this moment in particular that cements the character-driven approach of this film. The challenges are less about whether or not flaming death slides are scary and more about confronting our own demons and our own bad habits. This moment helps the story transcend the mundane and become something quite personal and relatable. In acknowledging his bad behaviour, we get our first glimpse of a successful challenge, and it acts as the pivot point by which the story turns for Cody from one of suffering to one of success. The genius of the movie is that his success comes from learning to be a better person rather than a better surfer.

Finally, we get to the third challenge. Cody goes back to the beach to apologize. Humbled and wiser, he draws out the shape of a new board on the other half of the log and starts to methodically, meditatively carve out a new board, embodying everything Geek tried to teach him and taking the lessons he has learned from Lani about letting go of control and from his friend Chicken Joe about living in the moment. It is a physical manifestation of his internal shift. The sequence culminates in the reward for his growth: a day out surfing with his hero Big Z, on a beautiful shore, with people he cares about. The Miracle of the Present Moment is exemplified in this "idyllic day" scene. Big Z, playing on his surfboard, utters a line: "Can you think of anything better than this?" This is the story's thematic climax—the pure, simple joy that Cody's ambition was blinding him to, realised in its fullest form.

Of course, as story people, we know that this is not the end. Having entered the innermost cave and come out the other side, our main character needs to incorporate what he has learned. This often involves once more confronting the reborn, Hydra-like head of our internal resistance. Change, after all, isn’t easy. It is important that our characters don’t change easily; they must resist the lessons. The arc is made much more satisfying because his transformation is tested under the highest stakes. Crucially, change in a good story is integration, not replacement. This is a really important, nuanced point. Cody is still ambitious and energetic at the end, but his new wisdom is integrated into his personality. He hasn't been replaced by a new penguin; he has grown. This is the key to creating authentic character development.

So how does this manifest for our hero, Cody?

The Final Showdown: A Chicken Meets the Childhood Dream

Cody faces one final gauntlet for his integration. He still wants to compete in the surfing competition despite everything he has learned about being in the moment, enjoying simple pleasures, and letting go of ambition. This shows that a new improved character is not replacing him, but rather is the same penguin, albeit with a new set of guiding moral principles. The high-stakes moment of truth is presented to him as two of his biggest internal selves are brought to bear against each other. In one corner is his childhood ambition: his lifelong dream to be a surfing champion and escape his old life. In the other corner are the new lessons from his experience with Geek, Lani, and Chicken Joe, that taught him to care for others, to be in the moment, and to appreciate surfing for the joy of the sport and not just as an opportunity to win.

As these two warring sides come together, we see him come out of a terrifying wave. Initially he seems shaky, but by breathing and staying in the moment, he finds his way through the foam and finds stability. In the second moment, he is about to win the tournament when his close friend Chicken Joe is threatened by Tank Evans. The two sides of his personality fight, and in the end, he chooses to save his friend. He gives up his first-place position in the competition to instead protect his friend in an act of selflessness that puts him in immediate danger, surfing into the deadly boneyard.

The resolution of this film is where the mastery of storytelling comes to its fruition. It hearkens to an ethos that is touted by Taoism, an ethos I have personally always enjoyed: that of ‘the master and the student being one and the same’. As we watch Cody wrestle with and integrate these two sides of himself—the competitive side and the loving side—we discover that Geek (aka Big Z), rather than being mad at Cody for competing, has in fact come to watch the competition in secret. Upon witnessing Cody’s act of selflessness, Big Z makes a crucial decision to integrate lessons he has been forced to confront, too.

You see, by meeting Cody, we have not had an exclusive mentor relationship where Big Z imparts wisdom to Cody in a one-way street. In this film, we have a master and student who are equally master and student to each other. They both have something to share, and they both have lessons to learn from each other. The writers have cleverly interwoven the two characters so that what one needs, the other has. In Big Z's case, he ran away from his former life because he was afraid of being a loser. He went into hiding and became a shadow of his former self. In learning through his relationship with Cody to accept his own medicine—that is, to enjoy the moment and not hold onto attachment to whether you are perceived as a winner or a loser—and seeing that competition isn’t the enemy, but his own fears were, he resolves to re-introduce himself to the world after saving Cody from the boneyard. The student teaches the master.

It is this clever interweaving of the mentor trope across multiple characters that really elevates this movie from being a simple surfing film to a film about self-development, confronting our own demons, and growing into better people.

Wobbly Cameras and Enigmatic Voices

There are two final elements of this film worth mentioning from the point of view of story craft.

Firstly, the voice acting. Shia Lebouf plays the main character Cody and does an excellent job of giving Cody real personality that feels distinct and authentic. As authors, we must remember this. We must write our characters as if another actor was playing that role. How do they speak? What is their tone and cadence? How does their attitude seep into their words? Our characters must not sound like us; they must sound like someone else.

Secondly, the documentary handheld style. How we communicate our story will have a major impact on how we receive the core messages. In this instance, the documentary style, the candid camera, the direct-to-camera acting—it all helps us connect more with these characters as reflections of reality. They aren’t in a theatre production; it is implied that this is a real place and real situation with people who have meaningful internal lives. In the end, this helps the character progression to feel that much more meaningful and relatable.

In a book, we don’t necessarily have the same benefits as you might in film to play with cinematography, editing, or camera work. But we have other tools that will help to communicate just as effectively: pacing, framing, tense, internal vs. external POV, and more. Use them wisely to support the messages and the story you want to tell.

Conclusion - Bringing It Back to the North Beach

The journey of Cody Maverick—from a life of fear-driven ambition to one of present-moment joy—is not just a great character arc; it's a perfect metaphor for the creative process itself. We can get so focused on the outcome, on finishing the book or "winning" the competition, that we forget to enjoy the simple, miraculous act of creating. We forget the feeling of shaping the board, of enjoying the slide, of just playing the ukulele on the water with people we care about. The story reminds us that success isn't the trophy; it's learning to be a better person, and that is a lesson that can only be learned in the here and now.

As storytellers, we can learn so much from the mechanics of how this film pulls it off. Its masterstroke is evolving the tropes we all know. Take the "distributed mentor" model. How can you, in your own work, take a standard story blueprint and give it a more interactive, communal, and surprising spin? How can you create a world where your hero learns not from one wise old sage, but from the combined wisdom of their entire community, where the student and master can teach each other?

Ultimately, the most powerful thing Surf's Up does is issue a challenge. It encourages us to find the "Big Z" lessons in our own work and lives. It’s a poignant reminder that we should not only write stories that champion these messages of presence and joy, but strive to live by them in our own creative practice. After all, what is the point of telling stories about what it means to be alive if we forget to live along the way?