Guts | Master’s Degree | Writing About Relationships
Written: 2026 Format: Short Story
Guts was written for a unit in my master’s degree, a short story exploring the emotional breakdown between two characters I had created within a friend’s D&D campaign—Kaelithra (Dippy) and Kalyis. Set in a fantasy tavern, it’s a confrontation about love, proof, and the desperate search for exception from someone who offers their warmth to everyone.
The challenge I set myself was to write emotional interiority within a fantasy setting without leaning on world-building as a crutch, borrowing an existing world instead of building one, and trusting prose alone to carry the weight.
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Open in new tab The Writing Process
I’ve known for a while that emotional interiority is the area of my writing I struggle with most. It’s tempting to reach for world-building and spectacle as an external solution to what should be an internal problem. Guts was a deliberate attempt to stop doing that.
Rather than building a world from scratch, I set the piece inside the D&D campaign my friend Morrow had built, using characters, Dippy and Kalyis, that already had emotional weight behind them. The pre-built emotional architecture meant I could access the truth of the scene without reaching for lore to fill in the gaps.
The decision to write in second person, while my go-to writing style, was also central to the piece’s purpose. Second person closes the gap between the reader and the narrator in a way first or third person doesn’t. The second person creates a forced intimacy that feels essential for a story about the inability to reach someone who seems unreachable.
Early drafts leaned too heavily on dialogue and interior thought, with limited grounding in physical space. Feedback from my cohort pushed me to anchor the emotional weight in the body and the room: the stone flags cool beneath Dippy’s feet, the burning beneath her scales, and the sparks at her mouth. Physiology became a way of externalising internal states without breaking perspective. The restringing of the viol emerged through revision as the scene’s central image: Kalyis’s unhurried expert attention to her instrument as the confrontation unfolds and the snap of the final string as it ruptures.
Writing Guts brought me closer to understanding what it means to trust prose to carry emotional weight without spectacle doing the heavy lifting, a lesson that applies as much to commercial copy as it does to literary fiction.
