How I Read Fictional Worlds

On Method, Structure, and Meaning

A Short Prelude

I should probably say a word about the kind of work you’re about to read on this Substack.

For the past year, I’ve been immersed in something that is still easier for me to practice than to name. For now, the closest phrase I have is mythic excavation: entering fictional or mythic worlds, tracing their rules, symbols, metaphysics, and emotional logic, and staying with them long enough for their deeper shape to begin to show itself.

I’ve been obsessed with stories for most of my life, and once I’ve entered a world properly, the questions tend not to stop.

Why is it built this way?
Why does this symbol appear here?
Why do these characters move as they do?
What kind of religion, cosmology, or emotional logic is operating underneath the visible story?
And, often most importantly: what is the cost of this world being arranged as it is?

Usually those questions either resolve into a deeper coherence, or they hit a wall. That wall can take different forms: weak writing, missing logic, symbolic incoherence, a world that doesn’t believe its own rules. At that point, my interest tends to collapse. I don’t think all stories are equal. I think stories can be true to themselves, or false to themselves. They can be shaped by genuine necessity, or by forceful external control. They can grow organically, or be bent out of shape.

What I’ve been trying to do is bring a little more discipline to that instinct.

That means first extracting the structure of a world as carefully as I can: its metaphysics, symbolic order, recurring rules, emotional pressures, and character logic. Only once that groundwork is in place do I begin writing.
My background is more technical than literary, so I tend to focus first on structure and clarity. The essays are mine in structure, argument, and analysis.

Part of this process has involved experimenting with large language models — but not as replacements for authorship, and not as machines that “write the thing for me.” I’m interested in whether a model can be constrained tightly enough by a world’s own logic that it becomes useful as an instrument of excavation rather than invention. Used properly, it is less a ghostwriter than a pressure test: a way of seeing whether the structure I’ve extracted is actually coherent enough to hold.

That probably sounds colder than it feels in practice.

In reality, none of it works unless the questions are honest, the attention is real, and the world is being approached with care rather than domination. The aim is not to reduce a story, but to get close enough to its internal logic that it can begin to explain itself from within.

The first essay that follows is the first real milestone of that work.

Think of it less as “AI-assisted criticism” and more as an experiment in whether a fictional world can be pressed until it yields its own hidden logic. If it works, you shouldn’t come away impressed by the method. You should come away with the stranger feeling that you’ve read something you already knew, or at least already felt.

That, ultimately, is the wager.

For those curious, I’ll try to write this method up more fully at some point.

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