Christians who pay attention to what their media is saying have a lot of concerns. Fantasy in particular has a lot of critics,1 and a particular trope in more modern fantasy seems worrying: good dragons. Should we write dragons as
Poetry and prose are the two great structural classes of human script-art. Prose is the standard, in our view, and poetry the exception. Historically, poetry has a much stronger presence in the world of art than prose, being much better
Poetry and prose and the two great structural classes of human script-art. Prose is the standard, in our view, and poetry the exception. Of course, historically poetry has a much stronger presence in the world of art than prose, being
Sometimes you shouldn’t write it. No, really. There are parts of every story that you shouldn’t put on the page. Sometimes they seem so attractive, so fun to write, so interesting a part of the story. But you have to
Modernity is myopic. We tend to assume that everybody in the past, deep down, thought in the same way we do, with the same essential premises. Further, we’re terrible at logical (or strategic) empathy, at seeing people through their own
Writer’s block is a pain and a half. You don’t want it, I don’t want it, and we’ve both had it more often than we like to remember. You sit down, you stare at the page, and you realize that
Tom, Dick, and Harry are all very fine names, but we generally need more than those three. For one thing, the romance between Prince Tom and Princess Dick is going to look a bit odd on the page. For another,
If you’ve read much G.K. Chesterton, you’ve probably realized that some of his stories are better starting places than others. Father Brown, generally speaking, is a much gentler introduction to his style and philosophy than Manalive or The Man Who
As we discussed last week, while law provides a problem, justification alone provides an answer, at least for the real world. As our stories are reflections of the real world (seen in the failure of the antinomian answer in both
Redemption arcs have a difficult problem: how do we deal with the (often horrific) history of the character being redeemed? It’s a real-life problem too. How do we deal with the man who is repenting of a long history of