Few genres have such a distinctive look and feel as noir fiction. A successor of ‘hard-boiled’ or ‘pulp’ fiction, you’ll know the conventions of noir even if you’ve never read The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep – seedy urban underbellies, trench-coat-clad PIs, cigarettes, femme fatales, whiskey, flickering streetlights casting white pools on Chicago streets, nihilistic
Horses, mounts and other kinds of steed are the forgotten heroes of an adventurer’s story, but even when charging through crowds of orcs and goblins, they’re often the most unrealistic creatures in it, too. Thanks to Hollywood, we’re accustomed to seeing cowboys riding from sunrise to sunset without pause, or wild steeds successfully wrangled and
Pathos is down on its luck these days; appeals to emotion are bound up in reasonable fears of ‘post-truth’ and ‘populist’ writing, but I’m here to tell you that intelligent use of pathos can make your fiction better. Now, pathos certainly has its dark side. Many of the TV, radio, and internet adverts we’re bombarded
Writers have a lot of different ways of getting to know their characters. Character biographies, for example, allow you to figure out a character’s backstory, defining who they are and where they’ve come from. Hot-seating, a technique borrowed from actors, involves either imagining a character or pretending to be them, answering a series of questions
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