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Plot

What Is ‘Fridging’, And How Can You Avoid It?

July 11, 2018 by Robert Wood 15 Comments

What Is ‘Fridging’, And How Can You Avoid It?

What set your character on their path through the story? Yes, they should have a goal, but why is that goal so important to them? What kind of event is enough to justify telling a whole story about the reaction? A talented author can turn pretty much any event into a justifiable reason to follow a character through to the end, but there are also stock options – easy, tried and tested choices, that …

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5 Things George R. R. Martin Can Teach You About Writing

July 2, 2018 by Fred Johnson 5 Comments

5 Things George R. R. Martin Can Teach You About Writing

Twenty years ago, you might not have heard of George R. R. Martin, who, at that time, would have been merely the author of the modestly successful fantasy novel A Game of Thrones. In the years following, he would produce the sequels A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, and A Feast for Crows, all of which made big splashes in the world of fantasy literature but didn’t stray beyond their own niche …

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How To Manage The Politics Of Your Writing

June 13, 2018 by Robert Wood 8 Comments

How To Manage The Politics Of Your Writing

All art is political, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The way in which we believe the world to work – the way we think it should work – has a natural part to play in both our creation of fictional worlds and how we depict our own. The connection between art and politics is natural, but it runs deep, and that means that your political beliefs often influence your art in ways you don’t …

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Write Better Sports Fiction With These Tips

June 4, 2018 by Fred Johnson Leave a Comment

Write Better Sports Fiction With These Tips

It’s true that sports have had a difficult time breaking out of nonfiction (after all, there’s certainly no shortage of sports memoirs, biographies, and histories); despite the efforts of writers including Ernest Hemingway, Alan Sillitoe, Nick Hornby, David Foster Wallace, and Haruki Murakami, sports rarely seem to muscle into the literary sphere, and that’s a shame. Done well, a sharp game of …

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From The Mailbag: Your Questions Answered By An Editor

May 28, 2018 by Robert Wood 4 Comments

From The Mailbag: Your Questions Answered By An Editor

Today, we’re trying something new – namely, a professional editor is going to be diving into our (digital) mailbag and answering your questions. While we’re totally committed to a continued dialogue in our comments, some of your questions are unique enough that they deserved their own forum, so here we are! We’ll be doing this again soon, so if you have a specific question you’d like answered, …

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Can A Framing Device Improve Your Writing?

April 18, 2018 by Robert Wood 2 Comments

Can A Framing Device Improve Your Writing?

Sometimes, the thing that makes a story pop isn’t the exact events of the plot or the details of the characterisation, but the context in which the story is presented. Sometimes, it’s setting up a question or expectation with an unusual title, like in A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters and John Dies at the End; sometimes, it’s adopting unusual chronology, recounting events out of sequential …

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