Sometimes, the most effective villain is the one you didn’t see coming. It’s the helpful friend who turns out to be the villain’s stooge, the kindly inn-keeper hiding cannibalistic intent, or the sage master whose long-game is to tempt you to the dark side. Of course, for these villains to work, you have to trust
Seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. They’re the senses everyone knows – the way we interact with and understand the world around us – and yet so often, authors forget them when writing a story. That’s a shame, because sense writing is one of the surest ways to enliven a scene and fix your reader
You know that famous phrase, ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’? How about, ‘fake it ‘til you make it’? And what about, ‘to the left, to the left, everything you own in a box to the left’? Okay, that last one is totally irrelevant to this article, but still a stone-cold classic from Beyoncé’s
‘Show, don’t tell’ is classic advice for writers – something like a ‘golden rule’, delivered with complete surety and an authoritative tone by the last generation of authors to the next. This ‘set in stone’ approach drives many authors to try and pick it apart, but it’s survived so long for a reason: it is good
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