Every writer has a center of gravity—some quiet idea their work keeps returning to, even when they aren’t trying. It took me years, a memoir, a few broken novels, and a whole lot of personal upheaval to understand mine.
I call it The Fulcrum & Axis Theorem.
It sounds fancy, but I promise it’s not. It’s actually simple and human and maybe even obvious when you hear it:
Every story (and every life) turns on two forces:
the fulcrum—the moment of pressure that forces change—
and the axis—the quiet truth everything rotates around.
Transformation happens where those two meet.
Let me break that down in normal English.
The Fulcrum — The Moment Everything Tips
A fulcrum is the point where pressure becomes movement.
In life, that’s the moment where something hurts enough that you can’t stay the same anymore.
A diagnosis.
A breakup.
A relapse.
A loss.
A realization you didn’t want to have.
In a story, this is the crisis moment—where the character has to change or break.
My books always start here, even when I don’t notice it at first.
The Axis — The Truth You Can’t Escape
An axis is the still point at the center of a wheel.
It doesn’t move, but everything else moves around it.
In a life, your axis might be:
- your kid
- your shame
- your faith
- your grief
- your old wound
- your desire for love
- your need for meaning
- your fear of being forgotten
In fiction, it’s the character’s core truth—the thing that defines them even when the world tilts sideways.
My characters (and often, my narrators) always orbit around something like:
- guilt
- memory
- identity
- survival
- a ghost they can’t outrun
It took me a long time to understand that.
Why Put These Two Ideas Together?
Because for me, writing is the act of watching someone (real or fictional) collide with their fulcrum and rotate around their axis.
That’s where transformation happens.
Not in the quiet moments alone.
Not in the crisis alone.
But in their meeting point.
Where force meets stillness.
Where pain meets perspective.
Where memory meets motion.
That’s where the story turns.
And that’s where a person turns too.
How This Became My Creative North Star
When I look back at everything I’ve written—The Cancer Diet, Grammar for the Dead, Empire, Nevada, and now the experimental monster-noir story Wolf Wounds—I can see the same structure repeating.
A fulcrum.
An axis.
A turning.
Even when I’m writing recursive metafiction or werewolf carnage, it’s all still just people trying to become something other than what their past demands.
Even collaborating with AI fits the theorem:
- The AI is a fulcrum—pressure, friction, new angles, strange ideas.
- I am the axis—the lived experience, emotion, voice, intent.
- The book happens in the leverage between us.
That’s the whole thing.
What This Means for Fulcrum & Axis Press
This isn’t just the name of my website.
It’s my organizing principle.
My creative philosophy.
My way of understanding why I write what I write.
And it’s the backbone of every story I’ll publish—whether polished novels under Fulcrum & Axis or experimental drafts over at AI-Slop.us, where I build the weird, chaotic stuff in public.
If you’re here because you like my work—or you’re just curious what the hell I’m doing—this theorem is the underlying reason any of it makes sense.
It’s why the stories turn the way they turn.
It’s why they break the way they break.
It’s why they heal the way they heal.
Why am I telling you this?
Because the whole point of this new phase of my writing career is transparency.
If I’m going to write honestly, I want to explain honestly.
If I’m going to share the polished books, I want to share the philosophy.
If I’m going to build experimental fiction labs and argue with AI in public, I want readers to understand the mechanism underneath the chaos.
This is the fulcrum.
This is the axis.
This is where everything I write begins.
And if something in that resonates with you, I hope you stick around.
—Frank
Check out more at https://fulcrumandaxis.com/blog/
Frank M. Anderson's Writing 
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