THE WRITING DOJO
Chess players drill positions. Fighters drill forms. Writers mostly just read advice and hope. This is the other way.
one rule, one broken passage, one repair
Un-dash It
No em dashes. No en dashes. Ever.
Rewrite the passage with no dashes at all, losing nothing. Commas, colons, full stops, or a reshaped sentence.
Repair this
He had one job that night — hold the door — and he had already decided he would not be moved, not by the noise outside, not by the thing that was making it.
TROPE ROULETTE
Three reels. Lock the ones you like, respin the rest, then write what they make.
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Write the scene these three make. Four hundred words is plenty. The catch is not a suggestion: it is the thing that stops this being the version everybody has already read.
The useful one
Bring Your Own Text
Paste anything you are working on and run the same house rules the books are held to. It stays in your browser.
yes, your actual manuscript. that is the point.
How the training works
Every drill teaches one rule from the system these books are written to. You do not read about the rule. You take a passage that breaks it and you fix it, and you find out immediately whether you did.
Daily drill
Five minutes. One rule. A streak you will not want to break.
Weekly challenge
Write a scene under a hard constraint. Trope roulette, a forbidden word, a fixed length.
Monthly Trial
The full contest, judged, with a real prize at the end of it.
Belts come with the drills you finish. The dojo is open to everyone while it is being built. Ranks, streaks and the full curriculum arrive with membership.