The prefaces to this consideration of The Princess and Curdie are two. First, I must highly commend the book to you, together with its prequel. MacDonald is a skilled teller of tales and includes many gems of insight in his
“In all the long wars with the Dark Tower, treason has ever been our greatest foe.” In the modern world, we have plenty of dark forces to point to. Child murderers to the left of me; warmongers to the right;
Allegory versus application The question of who Tom Bombadil is has puzzled Tolkien’s readers ever since he came out. Maiar? Valar? Man? Elf? Something else? He seems to possess certain traits which imply or exclude each of these, and the
Theology and writing have a sometimes fraught interaction. Art has an apparent opposition to theology, if we consider how awful preachiness can get, how making a story into a tract makes it a very bad story. At the same time,
Last week, we looked at the dichotomy between a sin’s historic fact and its moral guilt as they relate to redemption arcs. I asserted that redemption arcs are just not quite possible, in their fullness, outside of the Christian understanding,
The redemption arc is a difficult but powerful tool in the writer’s arsenal; it’s an even more difficult thing to undergo in real life, as Saul of Tarsus could no doubt tell you. See, sin exists. Because men sin and
Today we’re going to deal with two problems of direction, a false goal and a false guide to art. This is Part Three of a series (1, 2) dealing with the issues of modern writing, as I’ve observed them, a
Last week we discussed two issues common in modern writing: failure to take it seriously and disregard for realism. Today we’re continuing the topic with another issue endemic to the failures of popular media, particularly films and TV shows. We
The archetypical ‘pure evil’ race (no, not that kind of race) in fantasy is the orc, as inspired by (ripped off from) Tolkien, often by way of D&D. If you’re interested in writing fantasy, you almost certainly have some thoughts
Over Christmas break, devoid of either college or work, I did what I had long forsworn, in part from self-perservation, to do: I wrote a piece of fanfiction. Now, it’s not the only fanfiction I’ve written (this poem is based