Putting Place Names in their Proper Frames
Whenever I see fanciful or imaginative place names, real or fictional, my first instinct is not, “Ooh, how neat!” It’s more along the lines of,… Read More »Putting Place Names in their Proper Frames
Whenever I see fanciful or imaginative place names, real or fictional, my first instinct is not, “Ooh, how neat!” It’s more along the lines of,… Read More »Putting Place Names in their Proper Frames
When it comes to dangerous artifacts in a fictional setting, every writer faces at least two dilemmas: Why does everyone want this thing? Why is… Read More »Dangerous Artifacts and the Characters Who Love Them
NOTE: In case anyone’s forgotten my generic characters’ names, “Totally” refers to “Totally Everyguy,” Average’s male counterpart. (I add this note because my own mother… Read More »Verisimilitude: A Most Essential Plot Element
We’ve all been there. One minute you’re minding your own business, and the next, a dangerous and coveted plot device tumbles into your hands. And… Read More »Plot Devices and Other Narrative Thickeners
What’s this? An anticlimactic plot twist? Guilty as charged! The Author-Audience Contract An unwritten contract exists between every author and their audience. The author promises… Read More »Finding the Anticlimactic Way Out
The crisis nears its end! Last week, in the midst of procrastinating a fair number of tasks, I read a book. It was a decent… Read More »A Crisis in Deciding What Matters Most
Nestled among the marked (or “dispreferred”) behaviors of discourse we find a lovely little linguistic feature known as “hedging.” Hedging is the default refuge of… Read More »Hedging with Modals and Modifiers
Once upon a time, a fictional dog didn’t stand a snowball’s chance of surviving to the end of the story. Old Yeller, Bristle Face, and Where the Red… Read More »Like a Dog in a Doomsday Flick
Virtue, unfortunately, is too often disposable in a doomsday plot. We’ve all seen it: two people of casual acquaintance thrown into a story line that… Read More »The Principle of Expendable Virtue
Doomsday catalysts come in many flavors: asteroids, volcanoes, earthquakes, alien invasions, global warming, global thermonuclear war, and so forth. These cataclysmic events project such an… Read More »Doomsday Determines the Truly Worthy