Setting and Horror Certain things are true for all settings. If you want a sense of claustrophobic threat then small enclosed dark spaces ar...

I’ve been thinking about horror stories, about what elements are common to the genre. I had intended to do this all in one post, but it has ...

I’ve been on a journey of sorts over the past decade. I wanted to understand--intellectually, but also on a blood and bone level--the elemen...

Let’s talk about strong story openings.  I’ve been writing a series of blog posts on Lester Dent’s Short Story Structure  and realized that ...

This post is part of a series on Lester Dent’s method for writing a short story . You might think: Why should I care? Well, all the short st...

In previous posts  I’ve written about Lester Dent’s short story formula . Lester Dent was perhaps the best of the pulp-fiction writers of th...

The end goal of character creation, the Holy Grail, is for your reader to feel empathy for your character.  Jim Butcher writes: “...if you c...

This post continues my mini-series about how to introduce a character. I’ve already written about Exaggeration, Unusual Position and introdu...

Introductions are important.  Do you remember the first time you introduced your Significant Other to a parent? There are few things in life...

Today I continue my series on how to create a memorable character.  In my last post ( How to Write a Genre Story: Character Introduction: Ex...