Creative writing usually gets defended in emotional terms. It builds empathy, it processes feeling, it lets you live inside someone else’s experience for a while. All true. What gets talked about far less is a claim I ran across recently in some research on writing pedagogy: that creative writing, done a certain way, can actually train critical thinking, not just emotional range.

That’s a bigger claim than it sounds. Critical thinking usually gets treated as the opposite skill from storytelling: logic and argument on one side, imagination and feeling on the other. The research I’m thinking of pushes back on that split, using an idea borrowed from philosopher Martha Nussbaum, that self-awareness gained through narrative imagination is itself a form of critical reflection, not a separate thing that happens to sit next to it.

The Setup

The core of the argument comes from a study built around a single writing prompt: a single parent takes a job that requires two years away from their eleven-month-old child. Writers were asked to inhabit that dilemma in narrative form, rather than argue about it from the outside. Then, crucially, they were asked to reflect on what they’d written, on the choices their own narrative had made about who was right, who was sympathetic, what counted as a reasonable trade-off.

That second step is the actual mechanism. Writing the dilemma as a story forces you to make hundreds of small interpretive choices you’d never have to make in an essay: whose perspective the story centers, what details get emphasized, which character’s guilt or relief gets more page time. Reflecting afterward on why you made those choices, and what those choices reveal about your own assumptions, is where the critical thinking actually happens. Not in the writing itself. In the writer catching themselves in the act of having written a particular way.

Why This Is Harder Than an Essay

An essay lets you state your position and defend it. That’s a real cognitive skill, but it’s also one where your assumptions can hide comfortably behind the argument’s logic. A narrative doesn’t give you that cover. If you write the single parent as clearly justified and the disapproving relative as clearly small-minded, that’s not an argument you’ve made explicitly. It’s a bias you’ve enacted, in scene, without necessarily noticing you did it.

That’s the useful trap. Fiction makes you commit to interpretive choices before you’re consciously aware you’re making an argument at all. Going back afterward and asking why you wrote it that way surfaces something an essay would have let you keep hidden, on purpose or not.

Where This Lines Up With the Heresies Book

This is close to the actual structural bet the Heresies book is making, whether I’d have described it in these terms while writing it or not. Every chapter opens with Chieqe stating a claim in its most extreme, least defensible form. The essay that follows isn’t just arguing against her. It’s the same move as the reflection step in that research: taking a position that got stated instinctively and interrogating what it actually assumes, what it gets right, what it overreaches on.

Chieqe’s draw at the end of Heresy No. 16 isn’t a plot twist. It’s what happens when the reflective step is taken seriously all the way through: neither position collapses, because both were actually interrogated rather than one being set up to lose from the start. That’s the difference between using a character to stage an argument you’d already decided the outcome of, and using one to genuinely find out what the outcome should be.

The Practical Version

You don’t need a formal study or a moral dilemma prompt to use this. Next time you’re stuck on what you actually think about something, don’t write the essay. Write the scene. Give it to a character and let them make the choices the situation demands, then go back and ask what those choices assumed about who deserved sympathy and why. You’ll usually find the honest version of your position was hiding in the scene you wrote, not in the argument you would have made if you’d started with the essay instead.

Keep writing.

2nd-Person narrative is a narrative mode so shunned by the mainstream publishing industry that utilizing it to uncover its effects and honing it to be a sustainable method of storytelling is a myth. To a mainstream genre or literary fiction writer, the limited definition of its use as being a tool to only address the reader, as well as its being barred from the industry as a mere nuisance to readers is something to be adhered to like a creed.

Yet, to the burgeoning experimental writer, 2nd-Person has its appeal, and rightly so. As a misunderstood, under-utilized method of storytelling, 2nd-Person as a narrative mode operates in mysterious ways. It’s use of language such as the word “YOU” does stand as a form of address to the reader, as it invites them to place themselves in the situations invoked by the author. This is the crux of the titular Choose Your Own Adventure! style of story. But what if you make use of such language in a story that is told in a more traditional, closed and linear format?

Here are my take-aways from doing just that.

SKIN, told in 2nd-Person.

As the author, there isn’t much I have to say about Skin now that I’ve published it. After all, what harm could a story about culture shock do that hasn’t already been witnessed and written about before? Yet, it was from my desire to be challenged that I made the decision on a whim to write that tale as though it were intended for 2nd-person use. Though not a Choose Your Own Adventure tale, Skin is evocative in that it does invite the reader into the situations I’ve written about, but it also plays with the fact that YOU does not refer to the reader, but to the nameless main character in the story.

It was through the use of 2nd-person narrative that Skin got its bite. The readers, those whom I’ve spoken to, were gripped by being able to insert themselves into the story, although they weren’t sure what to make of the obvious layer of distance of not quite fitting in as the titular character. It led to instances of introspection and thrill, to the extent that they had to read it multiple times before being able to dismantle the tale and put it to rest.

In the context of a short story, it makes sense and works well. In part because readers know they’re not strapped in for miles should this turn out to be a bad fit for them. But, too, it is just the right amount of length for its implementation to not feel like an exhaustive, cheesy gimmick.

The important thing to underscore, should you take up Skin as an experimental read, is that you will need to experiment with it to get it just-right for the tale you’re intending to tell. 2nd-person didn’t up-and-drop into my lap. I had to contend with several openings and other seemingly extraneous details before it would get off the ground. Once it had, I needed to figure out how to make it feel as natural as possible, and during this phase I had the hardest struggle.

As a loner type of writer, there wasn’t a lot of feedback to get on it. As with a lot of experimentation, you may find yourself at odds against the mainstream and genre-loving crowds. In these scenarios, you have to trust your intuition (this is part of why it is good to know the basics and “rules” of writing, so that you know how to steer yourself towards familiar territory in the event that you might get lost). With enough fooling around with it, it’ll eventually begin to sound natural.

Once you’ve reached this phase of practice, 2nd-person gets… interesting.

2nd-Person: A Hybrid of 1st and 3rd…?

What are the effects of writing in 2nd-person as a narrative mode? You may have heard that it’s the most annoying of the narrative modes, the most taxing way to convey information, and readers don’t like it. While it may be true that readers aren’t used to this narrative mode, and that this particular narrative mode does not sell well, there is a wealth of experience to be gleaned from it.

2nd-person is unique in that it demands the writer have a different kind of intimate understanding of their story, for the simple fact that you’re calling the reader to be an active participant in the tale. Your other techniques will become quite limited. Things such as expositional infodumps, or heading off the beaten path and venturing into character arcs may have to take a back seat as the only information you’d be able to disseminate is that which the narrator immediately knows. Even then, you have to tread carefully for if you wear your reader down, they’re not going to make it through the book.

That being said, writing in 2nd-person narrative is pretty niche. It feels intimate like 1st person due to the nature of its language, and like 1st person, is just as limited, but may also at times find itself using literary strokes from the 3rd limited perspective. What does that mean?

That 2nd-person is closer, more intimate and intrusive to the reader, but it can be utilized in such a way that it flows almost as naturally as the common 3rd pov. There is no easy way to achieve this. Each tale is different, and each author needs to have a strong grip on their voice when attempting a story in this narrative mode. When, where, and how you use “YOU” and invoke the reader, or refer to a nameless character, or however you’ve gotten it set up will impact the overall readability of the story.

But if not addressing the reader, as I’ve hinted at, what else can 2nd-person be used for?

Rhetoric & 2nd-person.

What is rhetoric? Rhetoric is how we use language to influence our readers. 2nd-person is common in academic settings and rhetorical discourses, as the power of invoking the audience to be critically-thinking participants in the discourse is often seen as desirable to get the proper effect out of them.

On it’s own, Rhetoric is a winding and broad subject, the likes of which I don’t have time to get into as a writer myself. Still, it does not alter that its use of 2nd-person in address is critical to sustaining the message that the speaker is presenting. In these live or broadcast instances of having to address the audience, perhaps the best aspect to glean from the use of this technique is how to drive the point home in such a way that it impacts the listener.

As a writer, it’s important to keep that barrier in mind, that you may not always be talking directly to your reader such as in cases of orating carefully contrived messages to whatever gain or detriment. As your story progresses, you are going to have to carefully handle stretches of narration. Then what? Do you continue to refer to the reader as you describe the monotony of a glorious morning wherein they wake up, or the high-speed police chase that led to the discovery of unknown treasure?

Intimacy, Discomfort, Subjectivity, & YOU.

Sometimes, we have to acknowledge that prolific use of a technique is a bad thing. Given the rarity of 2nd-person narratives, and especially full-featured novels, there is always a degree of discomfort that readers will experience. A skilled writer will find ways to minimize the effects readers feel when utilizing this niche, experimental narrative mode.

Yet, for those who develop a liking to it, 2nd-person’s use is thrilling and compelling, especially because it puts the reader on the spot. A well-written tale in this narrative mode evokes such emotion and imagery the likes of which is unique to the method in which it is told. Such a literary skill should not go without practice, as even in small doses where this technique is not the focal method by which a story is written, its use can make statements and situations stand out to your audience as being more memorable.

I did mention that there is a level of distance between the writer, the reader, and the prose. Subjectivity is important when using 2nd-person. Unlike 1st and 3rd, it’s not as objectively interpreted, again, because the reader is involved, and beckoning them to participate invites them to bring their own experiences, sentiments and judgments to the fore of the tale. Despite how well-crafted your story may be, there will always be misinterpretations, and in the case of 2nd-person, all the more so.

Be prepared to receive criticism and feedback that you weren’t anticipating, and wouldn’t have thought to have gotten. Not in the usual “One man’s story is another man’s dumpsterfire kindling!” type of way, but be aware that people will bring the unexpected to the table.

It leads me to think, that as niche a storytelling mode as 2nd-person is, and with all the challenges it imposes, it has the potential to be a method of storytelling that is unique to and colored by the reader, since as the author, I’d have given them the freedom to accept or reject the plight and messages of the tale I’d woven in that style.

To 2nd, or not to 2nd?

There’s a lot still to uncover about 2nd-person narrative that I’m going to have to come back to address. But, in a nutshell, while you may be itching to give this one a try, I recommend giving it a lot more thought before diving right in. 2nd-person requires skills drawn from both 1st and 3rd, but utilized in ways different than we’re used to. Whether or not you should boils down to basic reader’s comprehension, and hoo-boi will that be a subject to go over.

For in the mean time, here’s some light reading on 2nd-person narrative.

Until next time.

Worldbuilding and lore get used interchangeably a lot, but they’re not quite the same job. Worldbuilding is the sum total of what you know about your setting. Lore is the specific slice of that knowledge the story actually leans on, the myths, histories, and half-remembered events that shape why characters act the way they do right now.

A story can be milieu-heavy without being lore-based. A lore-based story is one where the past isn’t just backdrop. It’s load-bearing. Pull it out and the present-day plot collapses.

The Rule You Already Know

There’s a line worth repeating here, one I’ve landed on before in thinking through worldbuilding: the best worldbuilding usually isn’t explained to the reader directly. It’s experienced. You don’t see gravity, you feel it when it puts you on the ground.

Lore works the same way. The strongest lore-based stories don’t open with a history lecture. They open with a character bumping into the consequences of history, a ruin nobody will walk past after dark, a name that makes an entire room go quiet, a law nobody remembers the reason for but everyone still obeys. The reader learns the lore is important before they learn what it actually says. That order matters more than people think.

Lore Wants to Be Withheld

Because lore lives in the past, it’s tempting to front-load it. Chapter one, page one: five hundred years of history before anyone does anything. This kills momentum almost every time, because the reader has no reason yet to care about kings and wars they haven’t met the consequences of.

Lore earns its place by consequence first, explanation second. Show the ruin, then let a character explain what happened there only once the reader is already curious enough to want the answer. This is functionally the same idea/character pacing question from the MICE quotient: the story opens with a question the audience actually wants answered, not one you’ve decided they should want answered.

Sources of Lore Inside the Story

Lore rarely needs a narrator standing outside the story to deliver it. It usually arrives through people and objects that were already going to be there anyway:

• A character who lived through it, and remembers wrong, or remembers selectively.
• A physical object (a monument, a scar, a banned book) that forces the question of why it exists.
• An institution that still enforces a rule nobody living can explain, which is its own kind of lore delivery.
• A song, prayer, or children’s rhyme that’s technically history, worn down into something people recite without meaning.

That last one is worth dwelling on. Lore that’s decayed into ritual, a phrase everyone says but nobody can unpack, tends to land harder than lore that’s still treated as fact. It signals time has passed, that the event mattered enough to survive but not enough to stay accurate.

The Trap: Lore as a Substitute for Story

Lore-heavy fiction has a specific failure mode. The writer falls in love with the history and starts mistaking depth of world for depth of story. You end up with pages of internally consistent backstory and nobody currently in the scene wants anything.

The test is simple: does a character in the present timeline want something because of this lore, or does the lore just exist because you built it and you’re proud of it? If it’s the second one, it belongs in your notes, not on the page. Worldbuilding is for you. Lore that makes it into the story has to be for the reader, meaning it has to be doing work on someone’s present-tense motivation.

Unreliable Lore Is Underused

One of the more interesting moves available to a lore-based story is letting the lore be wrong, or contested. Two cultures remembering the same war differently isn’t just texture, it’s conflict you get for free. A character built their entire identity on a legend that turns out to be propaganda. That’s not just backstory, that’s an event-story climax hiding inside what looked like a milieu setup.

Treating lore as fixed and true removes one of the more useful tools available: the reveal that history lied.

The Point

Lore-based storylines work when the past keeps pressure on the present. If your history section could be deleted and nothing in the current plot would need rewriting, it isn’t lore yet. It’s just notes you haven’t found a use for.

Keep writing.

Last post I ran through Milieu, Idea, Character, and Event as four ways of categorizing a story. That was the overview. This is the part where it actually gets useful: not as a filing system, but as a tool for figuring out where your story should begin and end.

The Real Problem MICE Solves

The usual advice for where to start a story is “find the inciting incident.” That’s fine advice, except it’s vague to the point of being nearly useless. Inciting incident according to what standard? The character’s life? The world’s crisis? Their internal realization?

Orson Scott Card built the MICE quotient to answer a sharper question: what element opens the story, and what has to happen for that same element to close. Once you know which of the four you’re actually writing, the correct beginning and ending point stop being a guess.

Each Type Opens and Closes on Its Own Terms

Milieu opens the moment a character enters an unfamiliar place, and it closes when they leave it (or it stops being unfamiliar to them). That’s why so many milieu stories start with arrival and end with departure or transformation into someone who now belongs. The container is the world itself, so the story is only “done” once the character’s relationship to that world has resolved one way or the other.

Idea opens with a question. Not a mystery necessarily, but a genuine unknown that the reader wants answered: what if, or why does, or how could this be true. It closes the moment the question is answered, whether the answer is comforting or not. This is why idea stories can feel unsatisfying if they wander past the answer. Once the reader knows, the story’s job is finished.

Character opens when a character becomes dissatisfied with their situation and closes when they either become satisfied with it, or make peace with the fact that they won’t be. Everything in between is the character trying, failing, adjusting, and trying again. There’s no external event required to open or close this kind of story. It’s entirely internal.

Event opens when something goes wrong with the world, though not usually at the exact moment it breaks. It opens when the person capable of addressing it steps into the frame. It closes when the wrong has been righted (or permanently isn’t going to be), and the world settles into whatever its new normal is.

The Maguffin Trap

Here’s where it gets interesting. Readers frequently don’t care about the same thing the plot claims to be about. Hitchcock had a word for this: the maguffin, the object or stakes the characters chase, which the audience doesn’t actually care about nearly as much as they care about the people chasing it.

Plenty of readers of Ender’s Game will tell you they were never that invested in the war against the Buggers. What kept them reading was Ender’s fight against an unjust system built to break him. The Buggers were the maguffin. Ender’s internal struggle was the character story running quietly underneath the event story.

This matters for MICE because it means your story can be structured as one type on the surface while carrying a second type as its real emotional engine. That’s not a flaw. It’s usually why the story works at all.

Combining and Nesting

You rarely get a pure specimen of any single type, and you don’t need one. What you do need is clarity about which type is doing the structural work, meaning which one determines your actual opening and closing points, because that’s the type the reader will hold you to.

A common pattern is nesting: opening with milieu (arrival in a new world), then opening a second layer with event (something’s wrong here), then closing the event thread before you close the milieu thread (the character resolves what’s wrong, then leaves, or settles in). Close the layers in roughly the reverse order you opened them, and the story tends to feel structurally sound even if the reader couldn’t tell you why. Get the order backward and it feels like the ending came from nowhere, or that the story kept going past its natural stopping point.

Using This Practically

If a draft feels like it doesn’t know where to end, don’t reach for a plot fix first. Ask which MICE element actually opened the story. If you opened with a character’s dissatisfaction, your ending needs to resolve that dissatisfaction, not just wrap up the external event. If you opened by dropping a character into a strange world, the story isn’t over just because the villain’s defeated. It’s over when their relationship to that world is settled.

The categories aren’t a cage. They’re a way of catching yourself before you write four hundred pages toward an ending that doesn’t answer the question you actually opened with.

Keep writing.

I promised this one a while back, in “On What to Write.” I said the kind of storytelling you use deserves a post of its own, separate from genre and style. Here it is.

Structure Is Not the Same Thing as Form

Before getting into types, it’s worth untangling two words people use interchangeably: form and structure.

Form is the container. A story can take the form of a letter, a diary, a string of emails, a verse narrative. Form is what the reader is holding, visually and conceptually, before they’ve read a single line of plot.

Structure is the skeleton underneath: how many setbacks the character faces, where the climax lands, whether there’s a long comedown after the conflict resolves or none at all. You could write the exact same structure as a straight third-person novel or as a fractured series of first-person fragments from five different heads. Same bones, different skin.

Most writers only ever think about structure. Form is the one people forget they’re allowed to touch.

The MICE Quotient

Orson Scott Card broke story down into four categories, not plots, but structures, organized around the question of what actually opens and closes the story. He calls it the MICE quotient: Milieu, Idea, Character, Event.

Milieu. The story is about the place. A character arrives somewhere strange, takes it in, is changed by it, and either leaves or doesn’t. Gulliver’s Travels is the textbook case; nobody reads it for Gulliver’s inner life. They read it for the lands. If your story keeps wanting to stop and look around, you’re probably writing milieu, whether you meant to or not.

Idea. The story exists to chase down a piece of information. What if a virus only killed people with the gene for telepathy. The idea sits in the driver’s seat, and the plot is just the mechanism for uncovering it. Everyone’s actions and dialogue exist to serve that one central question. Hard science fiction lives here.

Character. The plot is a byproduct of who the characters are. Each scene happens because of the last person’s reaction to the one before it. This is the type where outlining ahead of time can actually work against you. The honest version of a character-driven story is one where you find out what the character does by sitting down and watching them do it.

Event. Something has gone wrong with the world, and the story doesn’t start at the moment it breaks. It starts when the person capable of fixing it steps into the frame. It ends when the wrong is righted, though not necessarily returned to exactly how it was. Most fantasy is event-driven. So, for what it’s worth, are Macbeth and Emma.

None of these are pure in practice. A milieu story can carry a murder mystery in its side pocket. A character story can have a strong secondary interest in the world. The categories aren’t rules so much as a way to figure out where your story actually opens and closes, which, according to Card, is the harder question than most people admit.

Where Form Gets Weird

This is where I’d point back to something I already wrote about directly: second-person narrative. Most of the industry treats “you” as a gimmick reserved for Choose Your Own Adventure books, a form so narrow it barely counts as a real option. But nothing stops you from using second-person address inside a closed, linear, traditional structure, where “you” doesn’t mean the reader at all, but the story’s own nameless protagonist.

That’s a form choice layered on top of whatever MICE structure the story already has. It doesn’t change whether the piece is milieu or character or event. It changes the distance the reader stands at while experiencing it. Readers I’ve talked to about that kind of story keep circling back to the same reaction: a mix of being pulled in and being unsettled by not quite fitting the “you” they’ve been handed. That’s form doing its job.

The Point

Knowing these categories isn’t about picking one off a shelf before you start typing. It’s a diagnostic. If a draft feels shapeless, ask which one you’re actually writing. You’ll often find you’ve been trying to write two incompatible types at once, or you’ve picked a form that’s fighting your structure instead of sharpening it.

Keep writing.