Master Fiction Writing

A character walking into a room might seem like simple scene logistics, but an entrance can reveal far more than movement. It can show power, fear, desire, belonging, exclusion, secrecy, status, and change before anyone says a word.
In this episode of Master Fiction Writing, Stuart Wakefield explores the doorway scene: those small but potent moments when a character crosses from one emotional territory into another. Whether your character is arriving at a party, entering a meeting room, returning to a family home, stepping into danger, or trying not to be noticed, the way they enter can quietly reshape the whole scene.
You’ll learn how to use entrances and arrivals to create story pressure, deepen character dynamics, reveal shifting relationships, and strengthen subtext without making every doorway feel grand or symbolic. This episode also includes practical revision questions and a simple writing exercise to help you spot underused threshold moments in your own manuscript.

The middle of a novel is often where writers begin to worry. The opening had energy, and the ending may be in sight, but somewhere in between, the story starts to feel slow, repetitive or strangely... directionless.
The usual advice is to raise the stakes, add conflict or introduce a twist. Those tools can help, but what if the real problem isn't that your protagonist needs more obstacles? What if they need a deeper understanding of what their goal is going to cost them?
In this episode, Stuart explores why a compelling middle does more than make a character’s original desire harder to achieve: it changes what achieving that desire would mean. Whether you’re writing romance, mystery, thriller, speculative fiction, historical fiction or family drama, you’ll learn how the middle can reveal the emotional, moral or personal question hiding beneath the visible plot.
You’ll also get a practical exercise to help diagnose a middle that isn’t working and uncover the more difficult question your story may be waiting to ask.

What actually makes a thriller a thriller? It isn’t just murder, spies, guns, plot twists, or car chases.
In this episode of Master Fiction Writing, we take a deep dive into the thriller genre as a pressure system: sustained threat, escalating stakes, urgent choices, controlled information, and the nervous anticipation that keeps readers turning pages.
We’ll explore how thrillers differ from mystery, suspense, horror, and crime fiction; how to create tension without constant action; why stakes need to be specific and personal; how twists differ from revelations; and how writers in any genre can use thriller principles to make their stories more compelling.

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Does every protagonist really need to change by the end of a story? Not always.
In this episode, we look beyond the familiar “your character must change” advice and explore positive arcs, negative arcs, steadfast characters, ensemble stories, and intentional stasis.
You’ll learn how to ask the better craft question: not “does my protagonist change?” but “what moves?”

Do your characters keep feeling sad, furious, lonely, ashamed, or devastated on the page... but the reader still isn’t feeling much?
In this episode of Master Fiction Writing, we’re looking at the difference between explained emotion and experienced emotion. You’ll learn why naming a feeling isn’t always the same as creating it, and how to give the reader stronger emotional evidence through behaviour, body language, thought patterns, sensory detail, dialogue, silence, subtext, objects, and action under pressure.
We’ll also look at when it’s perfectly fine to name an emotion directly, why over-explaining is such a normal drafting habit, and how to revise emotional labels into moments the reader can actually feel.
The takeaway: your job isn’t to hide emotion from the reader. Your job is to make emotion happen inside the reader.
If you enjoy the podcast and would like to support future episodes, you can buy me a virtual coffee over on Ko-fi: ⁠https://ko-fi.com/masterfictionwriting⁠
No pressure at all, but it does help keep the podcast going, and lets me pretend I’m a terrifyingly organised media empire.