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...

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...

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

I’ve already gone over Swain’s idea of a character’s dominant impression , now let’s talk about their dominant attitude. A character’s attit...

Characters--Homo Fictus--are the raw material from which stories are created, but who are these entities who populate our stories and how do...

( FYI, this post is part of my How to Write a Genre Story series. By rights I should have titled it How to Write a Genre Story: Setting and ...

There are many stories that don't fit the hero’s journey. For example, the movies Psycho and The Princess Bride. And that's great! ...

How to Generate Conflict Conflict results from the clash of two things: a character's goal and the opposition to that goal. It follows t...

This would have been a great thing to do for Halloween! Oh well, better late than never. Today I want to talk about something that has f...

Over the years I've written a few articles about the various ways a story can be structured (see: Short Story Structures: Several Wa...