Craft tip # 13: Dragons, Laser Guns, and the Sentence You Refuse to Write

Craft tip # 13: Dragons, Laser Guns, and the Sentence You Refuse to Write

Love what you write and Hate what you refuse to write

Alex Eos

May 22, 2026

I once wrote this in my notebook:

Love what you write.

Hate what you do not write.

At first glance, that sounds inspirational. The kind of sentence you could slap onto a mug, ignore for six months, and then rediscover while emotionally unraveling over a draft and a suspiciously expensive drink.

Unfortunately, it is not motivational.

This isn’t really a craft tip, but an article someone needs to hear. An article that states you are not alone in your writing journey. We talked about write what you know being okay advice if used correctly. But what I failed to mention is: write what you love and write outside your comfort zone.

For me, I love a good dragon.

Give me scales, fire, emotional damage, a vaguely political backstory, and a gay wedding that gets ruined by a curse from a prince who gives his lover a cursed necklace that turns him into a dragon. I am already invested. Add a laser gun, a morally questionable empire, and at least one character making a catastrophic decision with the confidence of a person getting their private investigator’s license from the back of a cereal box. Now we have a story.

This is, unfortunately, where a lot of writers, including myself, get into trouble.

Because dragons, by all means, are impressive.

Laser guns and light-up sabers are bad ass. I don’t care what you say. Han Solo shot first.

Entire civilizations built on floating rocks with questionable economic policies are impressive and interesting.

None of those things will save a scene where the writer quietly, professionally, and with great artistic dignity avoids the one sentence that would have made it honest. The fact that they refuse to double down on the absurdity because they fear no one would read it, or that it sounds dumb, brings me to our topic: love what you write.

You can build great empires, entire universes, and still refuse to write the moment where the world ends and it all matters.

Imposter syndrome is real, and a lot of writers do exactly that. They hide behind the safety, the mundane, the boring. They put their idea to the side and never finish writing what they love.

Love what you write, especially your characters

This doesn’t mean every draft is a masterpiece. If that were the case, I wouldn’t have over 300 rejections for my first book and 140 for my second. I’d be polishing imaginary Hugos and clearing shelf space for a hypothetical Booker.

I still, to this day, am getting rejection letters from agents despite my book Starforge being out with a publisher and my sequels being in the process of being edited.

So you’re asking yourself, Alex, you can self-publish on Amazon. But honestly, that’s a whole other issue, with how Amazon is completely shady with its algorithms and is now turning into an AI slop house. While I am not here to debate the importance of a free enterprise system and the ethical integrity of AI, I am just too lazy to self-publish, and I wanted to have a hybrid publisher handle everything except the marketing for it. The social media aspect is the only thing I kind of understand about publishing. Everything else I am learning as I go.

The point is, every draft, every written sentence, even a crooked one, has more value than the elegant imaginary version still floating in your head, wearing perfume and refusing to pay for a fancy dinner for one.

You can fix a bad paragraph.

You can cut a false note.

You can tighten pacing, sharpen dialogue, and remove every decorative little sentence that wandered into the manuscript thinking this was a sightseeing tour.

But you cannot revise what never made it onto the page.

That is why you have to love what you wrote first. Not because it is flawless, but because it exists.

Existence is useful, even if it’s an existential crisis coming from an unreliable, nihilistic narrator hating that they wrote existence is useful.

Hate what you do not write

This is where things get messy. Because what you do not write is usually not random. You avoid things for reasons.

For me, it’s spicy sex scenes in romantasy. I try to keep my romantasy wholesome and not dark. The secret is that I do not know how to write them well enough without it slipping into a hentai-grade narrative.

For other writers, it could be one of the following:

Writers say they want depth, but a lot of them really want controlled depth. Respectable depth. Depth that arrives fully dressed, says the correct thing, and never once makes anyone in the room feel spiritually observed.

Unfortunately, stories do not work that way.

The scene starts breathing the second somebody wants something humiliating.

Detective Samara Cortez and the version a writer might avoid

Take Detective Samara Cortez. On paper, she is this unapologetic private investigator living in a man’s world above a Chinese food restaurant, which, in a spin-off, was owned by a millennial named Jason Lim.

A weak writer might be tempted to write her as politically correct, clean, overly competent (which she’s not at times), and emotionally unavailable in a way that looks cool. She enters the room self-contained, already under control, framed like a woman whose pain blended into the atmosphere.

This version is tidy and neat, but boring.

In reality, at times, Samara Cortez is a fucking hot mess, getting fired from the New San Francisco Police Department for a bar fight with men who do not see her as their equal, uncooperative with Jimmy the Rat from internal affairs. Yes, her arch-nemesis and frenemy is an actual rat with beady eyes and sharp teeth.

She takes a case in book two of the Starforge series because she needs rent money, and the only case that the police department can assign her is a humiliating noise complaint. Without revealing too much, because I am not sure how much I can reveal, to be honest, Samara takes the case only to find out that the noise complaint is an elder god trapped in the body of an eighty-something-year-old. The complication is that the granddaughter is hot, and she has to deal with her feelings and past relationships and one-night stands and eventually commit to this new relationship.

The honest, raw version doesn’t feel cheap. It is only interesting if the self-control is costing her something.

Not “she has a tragic past” in the abstract. Everybody has a tragic past in fiction. Tragedy is cheap. Specificity is expensive.

The real question is: what is she refusing to admit in the scene?

Not in her backstory document.

Not in your author notes.

In the actual scene.

Maybe she is not just suspicious of Jie Ke’s grandmother, or maybe Jason Lim reminds her of every person who ever smiled right before making her life worse.

The scene gets stronger the second Cortez stops being “mysterious” and starts being visibly, inconveniently affected.

That is the sentence people avoid.

Because “mysterious” is flattering.

“Damaged in a way that changes her behavior in real time” is harder to write.

But that is where the scene is.

Jason Lim and the danger of wit as armor

In Kitchen of the Stars, another book I can absolutely spoil the shit out of because it is coming soon anyway, we get Jason Lim: a gay Asian American millennial living his best life through quirkiness, pop culture references, and, in later works, repeated attempts to cosplay as a cosmic lawyer.

Jason is especially dangerous in this respect because funny, quirky characters give writers a thousand opportunities to avoid honesty while still sounding clever.

Humor is one of the greatest defensive weapons ever invented. God bless it.

It can sharpen a scene, reveal character, make pain land harder, expose how systems fail people, and keep sentimentality from turning into emotional tax fraud.

It can also become camouflage.

With Jason Lim, the temptation is to let him joke one line too early, deflect one emotional beat too smoothly, or slip into banter before the wound has had time to bleed.

Because he is charming. He is sassy. He is easier to write when he is verbally armed.

But the stronger version of the scene is often the one where the joke fails to save him.

The one where he says something flippant and the truth gets through anyway.

Here’s an example:

Jason Lim’s dirty laundry made the room dazzle and the crowd gasp. The occasional pervert cheered and smiled. Jason saw his freshman-year laptop screensaver—muscular anime men in positions that required careful cropping and censor bars, the kind that made the reflection ripple with pixelation. He saw the 400-plus screenshots of soft-boy plushie characters with suspicious bedroom eyes. And the folder labeled definitely not Yaoi with sparkly pink kawaii icons was either a cry for help, a signed confession, or both. It was somehow more damning than all of it combined.

“That one’s not mine,” Jason said. “I’m holding it for a friend.”

The universe had personally witnessed him download every file in that folder at three in the morning with the intensity of a grad student doing thesis research and declined to comment.

That is the scene writers dodge, because it requires letting Jason be human. It requires letting him be exposed.

Not stripped of humor. Just denied the right to use it as a complete escape plan.

Because if every vulnerable moment turns into a good line, then the writer has protected the character so successfully that the story can no longer touch him.

And once the story cannot touch him, neither can the reader.

Where writers flinch

A scene usually fails in one of two ways:

Either the writer does not know what the character wants, or the writer knows perfectly well and is too scared to let them want it in public.

That second category causes a shocking amount of bad writing.

You can see it when:

That is the tell.

The manuscript is not always broken because the writer lacks talent.

Sometimes it is broken because the writer flinched.

The practical craft rule

When a scene is not working, ask yourself this:

What is the most emotionally inconvenient truth in this moment, and did I actually write it?

Not imply it.

Not circle it.

Not dress it in gorgeous prose and leave it standing outside in a formal coat.

Did you write it?

Some examples from my writing:

That is where the revision usually begins.

Not with prettier sentences.

With more dangerous ones.

What this changed for me

Once I started thinking this way, revision got much easier and much crueler.

Because instead of asking, “Is this scene polished?”

I started asking, “What am I protecting here?”

Usually the answer was obvious and deeply annoying.

I was protecting the character from looking pathetic.

Or cruel.

Or needy.

Or jealous.

Or too in love to survive with dignity.

Which meant I was also protecting the reader from the part they might actually remember.

That is the trap.

A lot of scenes are technically fine.

Very few are honest enough to matter.

So yes:

Love what you write.

Love it because it exists. Because it can be revised. Because even a messy draft is still evidence that you showed up and put something living on the page.

But hate what you do not write.

Hate the skipped confession.

Hate the softened reaction.

Hate the sentence that would have made Jason less charming, Cortez less controlled, or a character less easy to admire.

Because that missing sentence is usually doing more damage to the story than any clunky paragraph ever could.

The scene you avoid is usually the one that matters.

Which is unfortunate.

Because it is also usually the one that knows exactly where to stab you.

If a scene is not working, stop asking how to make it prettier.

Ask what you refused to let happen.

Then write that.

Even if it ruins the character’s dignity.

Even if it ruins yours a little too.

That is often where the story starts acting like it has a pulse.

Until next time,

Alex 🧋