Pacing- story pacing, not reiterative walking- is a tricky beast. The problem, fundamentally, is that you, the author, have to determine not only how fast the story should move but how fast it does move. The first, honestly, is not
The list of ways to go wrong with a story has been added to and debated endlessly for century upon century upon century. The debate on plot alone is a few libraries of its own, honestly, and I don’t pretend
Magic (with its hundred other pseudonyms) is the staple concept of fantasy. It’s the excuse for a thousand plots and the solution for a million problems. In some people’s minds, magic can do anything, solve any plot hole, fill any
I have an affection for fantasy, born from The Lord of the Rings and fostered through the years, and an affection for historical fiction, born from many thousands of pages (hundreds of books, likely) in my youth. I’m not much
You can find Part One of this article, and a lot of necessary context here. Another example (of magic that isn’t Biblically condemned) is magic which is not innate but which does not originate from an exterior supernatural creature. In
Part One Fantasy, some have said, is the gateway to devil worship, sorcery, and the occult. The assertion is not entirely unreasonable: the Bible does condemn sorcery, and fantasy literature does contain an awful lot of (positively portrayed) sorcery. The
What, really, is the difference between a story that postulates elves living in the trees and a story that judges eating man-meat, cooked al a orc, a perfectly acceptable practice? The question is absurd, but the underlying idea is sound.
The term ‘Mary Sue’ has gained some fame recently. Anybody who follows online discourse regarding stories has seen it. Everybody who participates in online discourse, seemingly, has their own definition. Unfortunately, these definitions tend to differ, in details at least;
People despise ‘preachy’ stories. ‘Christian’ books (the genre, including its endemic heresy and superficiality) get a bad rap for putting the message so far ahead of the story that the story might as well not be there, for writing bad
I like strange words; I like them so much I create at least one or two new ones for every story, not even counting the names. I cannot, however, take full credit for the terminology I’ll be discussing today: ‘secondary