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
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
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
Ever since metaphorical pen was first set to metaphorical paper, a debate has raged: which is better, the happy ending or the sad one? The sides are many and varied, each side disagreeing with itself about why it’s right and
Good stories do not use miracles to solve problems, the lore says, and they do not use miracles to solve problems because miracles, according to common wisdom, destroy a story’s stakes, rendering great thrillers into dramatic yawn-factories. Yet the great
So, last week I went over three categories of worldbuilding problems (irremediable, unremedied, and inherent) and four types of wounds they can inflict on a story (to the setting, the plot, the characters, or the theology). Today we’re going to