The twelve commandments of writing

1. Each work should center on a meaningful tension between ideas, identities, or forces that is grounded in real conflict, whether personal, philosophical, social, or natural. The work need not resolve it, but must let it shape the experience.

2. A work must contain absence, not as a flaw, but as its breathing space. What is withheld beckons the reader into silence, into uncertainty, into the slow work of imagining. From that emptiness, meaning might appear, or not. It is not for the author to decide.

3. Each element in the work should be grounded in the reality of the world it describes. No flourishes, no decoration for its own sake. Let beauty arise from precision, not from excess.

4. Never explicitly state a feeling. Let it be known through what is seen, heard, or left unsaid.

5. Every word must carry engagement, personal, political, or philosophical. Not as propaganda and not as abstraction, but as a stance rooted in lived experience. The language itself should resist appropriation by power or profit and remain faithful to what it seeks to touch.

6. Let the story grow from the inner logic of the world, but resist perfect design. Do not construct events to serve the plot or emotion. Make space for coincidence, interruption, and the inexplicable. Reality is never fully ordered, and fiction should bear that mark.

7. Each work reveals a worldview, and that worldview carries traces of the author's character through what is shown, what is justified, and what is desired. Great art can arise from deeply flawed people, but the moral shape of the work remains part of its weight. Aesthetic power does not erase ethical presence.

8. A work is not only what it says, but how it appears, circulates, and reaches others. The form, the material, the context, and the way it is shared are all part of its meaning. Treat each decision, including cover, platform, and audience, not as marketing but as authorship.

9. Each adjective and every grammatical choice must earn its place. If its function is not clear, remove it. Clarity begins where decoration ends.

10. It is often within limitation that space is found. A boundary may offer more freedom than an open field. What is held in place begins to move. Constraint is not the end of possibility, but its beginning.

11. Find joy in the act of making. Do not hesitate to stop what you are doing and begin something new when you lose that joy. Give up quickly on what you are doing if it no longer feels right. Never give up on the search itself.

12. Every work should break at least one of these rules.