Bilbo called himself, “thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread,” and our stories can be the same. A story can be stuffed with plot, bursting with characters, burdened down to the water by themes, and still
At various points in the writing process, it behooves all of us to sit down and ask some pointed questions about what we’re doing, where the story’s been, and where it’s going. Indeed, these questions are vital not just to
I love the English language. Why? French is beautiful, they say, and German strident, with a thousand words for different shades of angst, and Latin is the language of history. Why do I love English, the mongrel language, son of
About a decade ago, I found a book in a used bookstore about ‘literary foils’. As I didn’t know what a literary foil was, all I got from skimming the textbook (I didn’t buy it) was that some short stories
People are incredibly, ridiculously complex. Our characters? Not so much, not in comparison. The most complex character has perhaps a few years of cumulative thought-history in his author’s mind; he’s made out of generalizations and half-rejected ideas and a unique
(Part One) – (Part Two) Character description doesn’t stop with the character. We’ve looked at tone and how important details are and how expectations work, but that’s all been focused on the character and the character’s role. Character description has
(Part One) Think of the last really good novel you read. For me, I’m nearing the end of my third or fourth read-through of That Hideous Strength. Think about how different characters are introduced and described. It varies, does it
Describing characters seems really easy until you actually try to do it well. On the one hand, we can put the entire description (three paragraphs, each slightly under a page long) at the front, which would get everything on the
If you have brushed with YouTube media criticism recently, at least in more right-wing or culturally disaffected circles, you’ve inevitably encountered a certain complaint: ‘The women in these new movies just aren’t hot enough.’ It’s touted as a reason for
Knives are easy for us to underestimate. They don’t have the range or thunder of a gun; they don’t have the reputation of a sword. When you’re writing, the knife can easily become a tool instead of a weapon for