The Ups and Downs of Characters
If we go back to mythology and folklore, the hero of a story can have superhuman qualities and is often semi-divine in origin - in...
Northrop Frye: An Order of Words
Canadian Herman Northrop Frye (July 14, 1912 – January 23, 1991) was one of the most influential literary critics and theorists of the...
Symbolism in 'To Kill a Mockingbird'
It's a little known fact to most school students who have to read To Kill a Mockingbird that Harper Lee submitted her manuscript to the...
Some Quotes About Fiction
Authors famous and not-so-famous often have something to say about the act and the art of writing fiction itself. Here's a selection of...
The Sorrowful State of the Villain
Purely virtuous heroes are hard for us to feel much affinity for. What’s interesting, though, is that as we move away from the complete...
The 7 Pillars of Successful Fiction
1. Core Ideas At the heart of whatever it is you want to communicate as a writer, whether that’s a very definite idea that you want...
In Search of Gawain's Green Chapel
Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th-century Middle English Arthurian romance. It draws on Welsh, Irish and English stories, as...
Writing and Other Arts
'The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the...
Why Protagonists Get Thinner
As you can read much more about in How Stories Really Work, and as has been written about earlier on this blog, protagonists are meant to...
15 Things About J. R. R. Tolkien That You May or May Not Know
As you probably know if you’re visiting this blog, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) wrote The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the...