Let’s be real. The internet is drowning in writing advice, and most of it is bullshit.

It’s well-meaning bullshit, sure. It’s the kind of safe, sterile advice designed to help you write a perfectly competent, perfectly boring book that will offend absolutely no one. But you and I? We’re not in the business of being competent. We’re in the business of building cages, orchestrating descents, and exploring the kind of love that feels more like a possession.

The rules that apply to "normal" stories will strangle the life out of the dark, twisted things we’re trying to create. So today, I'm taking a flamethrower to the rulebook. We’ll start by burning down the advice that almost killed my stories, and then we’ll salvage the gems—the dangerous truths that gave me permission to be the writer I am.

This is the stuff that sounds smart but is secretly soul-crushing for anyone who writes in the shadows.

The Golden Rule #1 I Reject: “Make Your Characters Likable.”

This advice is so popular because it’s based on a simple, kindergarten-level idea: we want to spend time with people we like. It sounds logical, right? Readers need someone to root for, a hero they can get behind.

My entire brand is built on the opposite premise. My stories are about being unraveled by love, not comforted by it. I don’t want you to like my anti-hero. I want you to be fascinated by him. I want you to fear him, to hate what he does, and to be absolutely, terrifyingly turned on by the way he focuses that darkness on the heroine. Likable is the enemy of intoxicating.

I remember writing an early draft of a mafia enforcer. I’d been told he needed a "save the cat" moment to be likable. So I tried it. I had this ruthless killer pause his shakedown to be kind to a stray dog. It felt so laughably fake, so utterly sterile, that it neutered the entire scene. I was betraying his dark heart for a pat on the head from a hypothetical reader. I stared at the screen and literally said, "Fuck this." I deleted the dog and had him break the guy's finger instead. The tension immediately roared back to life.

Likability is fleeting. Compulsion is a hook in the soul. Give your character an iron will, a terrifying obsession, a code that is entirely their own. We don't have to like them, but we should be unable to look away.

The Golden Rule #2 I Reject: “The Hero Must Be Relatable.”

"Readers need to see themselves in your characters." This feels profound. It suggests a deep, empathetic connection is the goal of all fiction. It’s the go-to advice for creating a grounded protagonist.

This advice is a disaster when you’re writing gods, monsters, and obsessive billionaires. My readers don't want my immortal Fae king to be relatable. They don't want him to worry about his taxes or struggle to order a coffee. That shatters the fantasy. The heroine is our relatable anchor to reality. The hero is the force of nature she collides with. He is the fantasy, the power, the relentless obsession she must survive. He's Solo Leveling's Sung Jinwoo—we don't relate to his power; we are addicted to watching him wield it.

 I was writing a post-apocalyptic warlord, a man forged in violence, and I was trying to give him some "relatable" internal conflict about his childhood. It was boring. It made him feel small. The moment I threw that out and focused on his alien, possessive mindset—the way he saw the heroine not as a person but as a beautiful, rare piece of property he had to acquire—his voice finally clicked. It was uncomfortable and wrong, and it was right for the story.

My Unapologetic Counter-Advice: Make the situation relatable, not the monster. We’ve all felt powerless. We’ve all felt a flicker of fear turn into curiosity. We’ve all been trapped, even metaphorically. Ground the reader in the heroine's universal emotional experience, and they will follow you anywhere, even into the arms of a creature they could never truly understand.

So we’ve left our warlord in his element—a monster, not a man. We’ve given ourselves permission to create characters who are compelling, not comfortable. But even the most captivating monster can be neutered by the next trap waiting in the shadows, the one that’s even more insidious than the first two. It’s the one that values action over psychology, pace over power.

The Golden Rule #3 I Reject: “Always Keep the Plot Moving.”

This is the mantra of the blockbuster movie script. Don’t bore the reader. Every scene must advance the external plot. If nothing happens, cut it. It’s all about pace, pace, pace.

My stories aren't about what happens. They're about what unfolds inside a character's mind. The plot is the pressure cooker; the story is the psychological meltdown happening inside it. The most important moments in my books are often the quietest—a heroine, alone in her gilded cage, realizing her fear is twisting into something that feels dangerously like anticipation. That is the entire point. To skip that for a car chase or a pointless argument is to gut the story of its soul. I'm not writing an action movie; I'm orchestrating a slow, deliberate surrender of the self.

I had a scene where a powerful supernatural being had captured my heroine. The "plot-driven" version of me thought, "Okay, she needs to find a weapon, look for an escape route, test the locks." It was a checklist of "doing stuff." But it was dead on the page. I threw it all out. Instead, I wrote a chapter where she does nothing but watch him. She studies the way he moves, the way power settles on him like a shroud, the casual cruelty in his gestures. She does nothing to escape. She simply observes, and in that observation, her perception of him shifts from "captor" to "force of nature." The external plot stalled, but the real story—her unraveling—had just begun.

Pace the psychological shift, not the plot points. The real tension isn't whether she will escape the room; it's whether she will escape with her soul intact. Let your characters breathe. Let them think. Let them stew in the dread and the desire. The quiet moments are where the darkness gets in.

Alright, we’ve burned the bad advice. Now, let’s talk about the dangerous truths. These are the permissions slips you need to write the kind of stories that leave scars.

Next time, we'll finally get to the good stuff—the dangerous truths you can build a career on.