What Powers a Protagonist?
When working on a protagonist, you are building a construct, not a person. By all means, assemble whole filing cabinets full of...
The Moment of Sacrifice
A protagonist and an antagonist can be basically the same figure, walking down different roads. A protagonist starts with a loss which...
The Foundations of Storytelling
90% of writers - those that actually get started on writing - sit down and simply write scene after scene straight from their...
5 Ways of Establishing an Ideal Reader
One good place to start as a writer is in thinking about readers. There's a mental process which you can go through to help you focus on...
Inside the Antagonist
The antagonist in fiction is that character who has adopted a fixed solution to an inner vacuum or emptiness or threat. This fixed...
6 Things To Remove From Your Story
Your job as an author is to remove yourself from the story completely. But you do this by progressively removing a number of other...
The Basic Principles of Editing
In practice, good editors are doing a very simple thing: they are recovering an author’s true potential from within a work where it has...
The Goal of Good Editing
It’s a common assumption, and a workable one for now, that a story is always junior to its author. By this it is meant that an idea or...
Telling a Story
If you sat down by a fireside with a good friend on a winter’s evening to tell that friend a story that you felt was deeply important,...