Illuminati Press

Uncomfortable Ideas for Curious Minds

  • How Do I Write Characters with Deep Flaws Without Making Them Unlikeable?

    Readers love flawed characters—until they don’t. Give a protagonist too many weaknesses, and they become exhausting to read. Make them too self-destructive, and readers lose patience. Make them too selfish, and readers start wondering why they should root for them at all. So how do you strike the balance? How do you write a character…

  • Why Don’t My Readers Care About My Protagonist?

    You’ve done everything right. Your protagonist has a detailed backstory, clear goals, and a unique voice. They fit the genre, they have depth, they even struggle with inner conflicts. And yet… something isn’t Why Don’t My Readers Care About My Protagonist? (Continued) Introduction You’ve done everything right. Your protagonist has a detailed backstory, clear goals,…

  • What’s the Secret to Writing Villains Who Aren’t Cartoonish?

    A bad villain ruins a good story. If they’re too one-dimensional, they feel fake, like a placeholder rather than a person. If their motivations don’t make sense, they come across as cartoonish, evil just for the sake of being evil. Readers don’t fear them, don’t respect them, don’t even find them interesting. But the best…

  • How Can I Write Characters Who Are Smarter Than Me?

    Writing a character who’s smarter than you feels like a paradox. How do you make someone more intelligent than you say things you wouldn’t have thought of yourself? How do you craft a master manipulator, a strategic genius, or a detective who pieces together clues faster than you ever could—when you are the one writing…

  • Why Do My Characters Feel Flat Even With Backstories?

    You’ve done the work. You’ve built an intricate backstory for your protagonist—where they were born, what their childhood was like, the defining moment that shaped them, their deepest fear. On paper, they should feel real. But on the page? They don’t. The character moves through scenes, saying and doing the right things, but something’s missing….

  • Should Your Writing Be Original or Just Good? The Balance Between Story and Style

    Writers are constantly told to “find their voice,” to be unique, to write something that stands out. And that’s true—eventually. But there’s a trap that comes with chasing originality too soon. Some writers become so obsessed with being different that they forget to be good. They focus on unusual sentence structures, experimental storytelling, or hyper-stylized…

Welcome to Illuminati Press

Welcome to Illuminati Press, your trusted source for smart, incisive, and yes, sometimes mind-bending explorations into philosophy, freedom, secret societies, and all those irresistible rabbit holes you can’t help but dive into at 3 AM.

This isn’t your average news site. Sure, we’ll talk about big ideas—liberty, education, spirituality, artificial intelligence, the end of humanity, and what it truly means to be human in an increasingly robotic world. But we’ll do it with style, authenticity, and just a dash of irreverence. Think Vice.com meets ancient manuscripts, meets clandestine whispers in dimly-lit libraries. No ads. Just truth. Just curiosity. Just excellence.

At Illuminati Press, we celebrate human genius—through meticulously researched articles, bold opinions, thought-provoking essays, and even literary competitions that reward brilliance (human or otherwise). We’re also launching innovative projects like the “Human Genre Project,” because if artificial intelligence is inevitable, we might as well make sure it’s human-friendly.

We specialize in deep dives, BIG PDFs, esoteric research that blows minds, and yes—revealing secrets you’ve always wondered about but never dared ask. Because being human is complicated.

Illuminati Press. Humanizing Artificial Intelligence, one prompt at a time.

Illuminati Press

An Esoterica Literary Journal