This sounds like tropes and elements, that are unique to genre. That’s half of it. Tropes should be sustained and elevated, same same but different. The other half is plot points which are pretty universal in commercial fiction: establish ordinary world before call to adventure, etc. you can hit a dozen very specific plot points without it ever seeming planned …

There’s an issue I haven’t had words for, until now, and it concerns “hopium” – the rational disconnect involved when you’re forced to believe in extraordinary results, despite all evidences to the contrary. The bigger this disconnect, the more brutal maintenance is required to keep up this level of optimism, but it’s a constant battle between motivation and belief. The …

How to write a satisfying story… movie breakdown Halfway through Netflix’s “The Tomorrow War” with Chris Pratt, I paused to take notes. It’s a great example of “the thing it costs is the one thing the hero refuses.” I’m only halfway through but I can see where this is going. 1. early scenes establish hero’s relationship with this father: his …

There are three ways to write a successful memoir: Be Someone Famous. Know Famous People. Write a Good Story. If you’re famous and you have a lot of fans, you can write about what you ate for breakfast and people will still read it. If you’re not famous but have met a lot of famous people, you can still cash …

A while ago I read Seth Godin’s This is Marketing; in this article I’ll try to parse meaning so you can apply his insights to your own creative projects. (Some of this may be paraphrased as I’m working off quick notes.) Firstly, Seth addresses the doubt and fear most creatives face around marketing their work: they just aren’t getting seen. …

After I finished writing BookCraft, I got a little obsessed with the particularities of writing a satisfying conclusion or resolution. It’s something I started noticing in TV shows and movies, especially: how the hero’s personal quest was deliberately illustrated with a hard comparison, a “before and after” that represented in a symbolic way the internal shift of change that was …

What does it mean when you get feedback on your writing or advice to “show don’t tell”? I get this question a lot but didn’t have a clear answer until now. It’s hard to teach without showing exactly how to do it with writing examples… but I actually came up with three great tricks recently to identify and remove “telling” …

This is usually where I’d post a roundup of the best (FREE to enter) 2021 writing contests. But I’ve decided not to, because even though they’re great for traffic, there are several sites that have already put lists like that together – I’ll link to those at the end of this post. So, why write anything at all? Because, I’ve …

Real quick: Medium is a side-project by Twitter CEO that’s mostly unmonetized but gets a crazy amount of traffic; making it one of the biggest content sites on the internet. You *can* get paid by views under certain conditions and *some* writers are making real money ($1000~$10,000 a month) but it’s not easy to do so. However, it can be …

There are some rumblings this week as Kindle announced a new program for authors called Kindle Vella; basically a short, serialized place for content that’s separate from the main Kindle store and runs more like a smartphone app. Several companies have tried to pull this off, (“Radish” is the most successful one) but Amazon has the clout and audience to …