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Anti-heroes afflicted with passivity are a problem. Victims can be main characters, but if they are passive, always acted upon rather than acting, they get tiresome. Readers tend to be first irritated and then bored by someone who just lets things happen to him time after time. The very narrative s…

If you make your character witty, or perceptive, or peculiarly thoughtful, readers realize that he may behave erratically but something worthwhile is underneath. If you let readers understand the circumstances that created his personality, so that his vices or crimes are understood as reactions to …

When you have an idea—“Abortions are bad,” “Alcoholism destroys homes,” “Old people are neglected”—and you write a story mainly to exemplify that idea, you’re giving your readers an exemplum, a little sermon that preaches by example. In a good story, however, the experience is primary, not a messag…

Rather than giving us license to write about what we don’t know, Henry James wants us to understand that the notion of experience is complicated. “The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life …

A broader application of write what you know recognizes that the idea of you is complex in itself. You, in theory at least, know yourself. But your self is made up of many selves—the girl who wanted an older brother, the high school misfit, the college student who dressed in black and wanted to…