Humans are an interactive group. We love to talk. Dialogue in real life serves as one of our primary windows into other people’s...

Depending on the genre in which you are writing, dialogue comprises a massive portion of any novel’s content. It is used to move along...

This one is more complex than the others because the line for when readers get annoyed, or at least when I get annoyed is fuzzy. Very...

There are some pretty fine lines at times between plot armor, world building and genre, so before we dive into them, let's define plot...

I’m going to borrow a term that, to my understanding, derives its origins in video games. Nerf, or nerfing, is to reduce the power of a...

In this piece about how not to annoy your audience, I want to touch on a failure I have seen in only a few books, but when it happens, it...

I don’t know how many times a reader will give an author a chance, in general. I can’t find reliable statistics on it. I will tell you...

This post for villains is about a few smaller topics for your villain. Two that I want to address are the over-powered villain and the...

One of the more common kinds of villain in today’s literature compared to literature of days past, at least in fantasy and science...

In our exploration of villains, perhaps one of the less used versions in modern novels is the flat out, evildoer. This villain is bad....

Villains. Sometimes they are friends turned against us, fallen heroes, antiheroines, the side of right in their own mind, or just plain...

Look inside yourself. What don’t you like? Don’t berate yourself, but find something. Think about how you work to overcome this, work...

Enter the villain. The antagonist. The counter to the heroes and heroines. The bad one. Something becomes relatable and visceral when we...

For me, in many ways, person versus society is the scariest of the conflicts. Gods you are pretty much stuck, if they want to fight you...

As we continue down the road of conflicts we come next to person versus high powers. These can show up in many forms and are very...

Perhaps the furthest removed from our modern society, a person versus nature is still a wonderful read, and a very valid story structure....

Over the next few weeks we are going to focus on different kind of conflicts, what we can learn from each of them, what they provide to...

That’s almost a tautology. Here is what I mean. We open a book, and the book is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. We learn about a...

I enjoy writing science fiction and fantasy, and I enjoy reading it too. Different people like different levels of immersion. Some reader...

Where do our responsibilities come from? They are extremely complicated, derived from our relationships, our age, our jobs, our...