A good villain will set your story apart. Some villains seem to be cardboard cutouts. Evil-doers, doing evil things, for the sole sake of being evil. On the other hand, some iconic villains are so fantastically good at being bad that the audience loves to hate them. So let’s make your story ...
What Makes Some Villains Good at Being Bad? 11 Lessons for Writers
Book Review: Alchemised by SenLinYu
Setting: Alchemised by SenLinYu is set in a fictional city called Paladia, on a fictional world. Paladia is an industrial center of the world, and an economic powerhouse. The Holdfast’s rule the city. They came to power when their ancestor, Orion Holdfast, fought a war against the first ...
The “But, Therefore” Rule: How to Fix Scattered Plots and Weak Character Arcs
There is a trap of discovery writing for inexperienced writers. The trap is this: discovery writing often turns into scattered story beats that aren't connected in a satisfying way for the reader. To fix your plot in such cases, use the "but, Therefore" rule to ensure a through line for each story ...
What Writers Can Learn From Magician: Apprentice
Raymond E. Feist's Magician: Apprentice was published in 1982, and more than forty years later I think it teaches fantasy writers some lessons that modern books often forget. So today I want to look at what this novel gets right—and a couple things I think it gets wrong. Magician: ...
Should I Start Over? 5 Questions to Help You Decide
"Should I start over?" is a question asked frequently by most writers at some point or another. It doesn't happen with every project, but I would venture to say that it's probably happened to everybody at least once. Every person has to develop their own writing process. And because the writing ...