We worry about contrivance and coincidence in our stories. For instance, in my novel, Why Ought I to Die?, the ending relies in large part on the main character being at a specific place at a specific time1, a place
We’ve gone over the ways you can lie in Part One, but that’s only half the battle. In fiction, a bad lie kills your story; a good lie (almost always) requires you to tell the truth eventually, finds its virtue
The first rule of lying to your reader: Don’t lie. The second rule? Lie to them all you like, as long as you’re telling the truth. Plot twists, that fabled love of many an over-enthusiastic author, rely upon such lies.
What makes a character relatable? Too much writing advice, particularly from woke activists, centers around using the character’s demographic and sociological traits to make them relatable. Black people, they say, need black characters to relate to. Asians need Asians. Polynesians
In The Three Uses of the Knife1, pages 73-75, David Mamet explains how, in his view, people reframe every time-sequence they find into a story, integrating each new fact of it by adjusting the story’s whole to fit: he avers
Have you ever gone back to read your old work, the stories you wrote way back when? I have. Let me tell you, that stuff is terrible reading. Oh, I still like some of the core ideas, some of the
Many of us have heard this piece of writing advice: “If you give Frodo a lightsaber, you have to give Sauron the Death Star.” On the surface, this directive sounds plausible. We want to maintain tension, and obviously if you
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