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
What, really, is the difference between a story that postulates elves living in the trees and a story that judges eating man-meat, cooked al a orc, a perfectly acceptable practice? The question is absurd, but the underlying idea is sound.
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