What We Wish We Had Known Sooner About Writing Literary Fiction

A new course on Writing Fiction with O.G. Rose

Dec 30, 2025

Cross-posted by Parallax

"We are excited to be teaching again at Parallax, with a focus on creative writing and our book, Under the Wing. Classes start January 17th, and you can signup here: https://www.parallax-media.com/courses/writing-literary-fiction-with-og-rose For a copy of Under the Wing, which we'd be honored for you to read, please see: https://www.og-rose.com/under-the-wing See you soon! "

- O.G. Rose

Course details

📅 Start date: Thursday, January 17, 2026
⏰ Time: 8:00 PM CET · 2:00 PM EST · 11:00 AM PST
💻 Format: 3 live Zoom classes + 3 practice sessions
💶 Tuition: €260 / €200 / €100 (tiered)

Registration: https://www.parallax-media.com/courses/writing-literary-fiction-with-og-rose

Most writers don’t fail because they lack talent. They fail because they don’t know what they don’t know.

That ignorance is dangerous in writing, because there is no clear feedback mechanism. In science or engineering, you know fairly quickly if you’re wrong. In literature, you can spend decades “improving” your work while moving further away from what actually matters. You can refine sentences, polish scenes, follow advice, attend workshops—and still feel that something essential never quite arrives.

This course with O.G. Rose is an attempt to name that missing something by clarifying the logic of literary fiction—at the level of sentences, stories, and ultimately, a life structured around writing.

The guiding question is simple: what do we wish we had known sooner?
The answer unfolds in three movements: writing, story, and vision.

At the level of writing, the problem is more basic than most people realize. Very few writers have seriously asked what a fiction sentence is for. Not what it means, or whether it is grammatically correct, but what it is supposed to do.

A fiction sentence does not merely convey information. If that were its task, technical manuals would be masterpieces. Nor is it enough for a sentence to be “pretty” or “clear.” Literary sentences must carry pressure. They must hold experience, ambiguity, rhythm, and time. They must make the reader feel something that cannot be reduced to explanation.

This is why strong storytellers often fail at literary fiction: they know how to structure events, but their sentences are inert. And it’s why gifted prose stylists can still write empty stories: their language sings, but nothing unfolds.

This is also why the current excitement around AI is so misplaced when it comes to fiction. AI can generate sentences, but it cannot solve what might be called the evaluation problem. It cannot tell you whether a sentence is doing what it ought to do unless you already know what that is. And if your internal standard is wrong, AI will only accelerate the error.

More importantly, writing and thinking are bound together. When you outsource writing, you weaken your ability to think, articulate, and speak. Knowledge you cannot express becomes alien inside you. It doesn’t empower you; it weighs you down. Even when AI produces something “good,” it often feels uncanny, as if spoken by an intelligent stranger who happens to share your vocabulary.

Literary writing is not about output. It is about developing a capacity.

At the level of the story, the confusion runs even deeper.

We tend to think of stories as sequences: one thing happens, then another, and eventually we arrive at an ending. Aristotle formalized this view long ago, and it still dominates how stories are taught. But sequence alone does not make a story meaningful—or memorable.

The distinction O.G. Rose emphasizes is between sequence and unfolding.

In an unfolding story, everything that happens emerges from the initial conditions. The ending does not merely conclude the plot; it reveals what was always latent from the beginning. When such an ending arrives, it feels surprising, yet inevitable. It could not have been otherwise—and yet you did not see it coming.

This is why endings matter so much. A bad ending doesn’t just disappoint; it retroactively empties what came before. When an ending feels arbitrary, it exposes that the story was never truly unfolding. It was only a chain of coherent events, not a living structure.

This distinction helps explain why some massively popular stories vanish from cultural memory almost overnight (See Game of Thrones, while others endure for generations (Lord of the Rings, for instance). Entertainment alone is not the issue. Many entertaining stories do last. What kills a story is arbitrariness—when nothing beneath the surface binds the events together.

The same logic applies to dialogue. Most fictional dialogue is wrong because it is too clear. Real human beings, especially those who love one another, constantly misunderstand each other. Meaning is distorted by emotion, history, resentment, fear, and desire. Dialogue that merely transmits information is not realistic; it is abstract.

Embodied storytelling means attending to how people actually speak, mishear, interrupt, evade, and wound—how language functions inside lived relationships.

This brings us to the most controversial claim of the conversation: a story cannot truly unfold without a positive vision of reality.

This does not mean a happy ending. In fact, conflating the two is one of the great errors of modern storytelling.

Positive vision does not mean that good triumphs cleanly over evil, or that suffering is resolved. Many of the darkest works in the literary canon are not nihilistic at all. What they offer is not comfort, but grandeur—courage, sacrifice, fidelity, the capacity to act meaningfully even when the world does not reward you for it.

Modern fiction often mistakes negativity for realism. After war, trauma, and cultural collapse, this reaction is understandable. But when negativity becomes total, stories stop unfolding. They collapse into sequences of shock, subversion, or despair. The work may feel edgy or honest, but it leaves nothing behind except confirmation that life is empty.

The great stories do something else. Even when they end in loss or exile, they reveal that life is more than we thought—not less. They expand our sense of what human beings are capable of. That expansion, not optimism, is what gives them lasting power.

The rejection of tradition has also played a role in this impoverishment.

Many writers fear influence. They worry that reading the great works will dilute their originality. In truth, the opposite is the case. You do not find your voice by isolating yourself from tradition; you find it by entering a lineage of voices and discovering how yours in unique.

The canon did not arise because experts declared certain books superior. It emerged because some works proved inexhaustibly inspiring. They generated more writing, more thought, more life. The canon is a record of influence, not authority.

Imitation is not the enemy of originality. It is often the path to it. By absorbing the rhythms, structures, and music of great writers, something eventually breaks through that cannot be reduced to copying. Newness emerges not from purity, but from saturation.

Finally, there is vision.

Most writers oscillate between two unsatisfying poles: waiting for inspiration or forcing productivity through discipline. Vision is the false choice dissolved. It is not a mood, but an architecture.

Vision means structuring your life—your reading, conversations, habits, time, and attention—so that inspiration becomes more likely and more usable. It is the difference between spirituality as whim and creativity as devotion. Inspiration without vision tends to collapse into therapy, confession, or negativity. Vision directs inspiration outward, toward something beyond the self.

Writing, in this sense, is not about healing your trauma. It is about changing your life. Trauma may heal along the way, but that is not the aim. Literature demands transformation, not merely expression.

When vision is absent, inspiration becomes a trap. When vision is present, inspiration becomes fruitful.

This is what the course is really about.

Not how to write faster, or publish more, or follow trends—but how to orient yourself so that your sentences matter, your stories unfold, and your writing participates in something larger than your own reflection.

It is an attempt to recover what literary fiction has always known, but often forgets: that writing is not merely a craft or a product, but a way of standing in the world.

And that if you take it seriously enough, it may ask you—quietly but relentlessly—to change your life.

Invitation:

Parallax invites you to a three-part live course with O.G. Rose on the craft and practice of literary fiction.

The course takes place over six sessions and combines teaching, discussion, and guided practice. It is designed for writers who are already committed to their work and want to deepen it with greater clarity, precision, and direction.

Course details

Registration: https://www.parallax-media.com/courses/writing-literary-fiction-with-og-rose

Come join us.
Because you must change your life.