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
Worldbuilding, no matter how you cut it, is a difficult task, at least if you’re actually trying to do it right. Sometimes you feel like you have to become an expert in a hundred different fields at once; sometimes, you’re
UPDATE: I’ve revisited this topic in more detail and with more accuracy here. Go there instead, please. ‘Death of the author’ is a fairly grim name for a somewhat controversial approach to interpretation. Whether fortunately or unfortunately, it does not