Recent content by Devor

^ This is the problem. The inherent contradiction. If we mean the concept, then we should say concept, or premise, not the idea. Our words matter and shape our vision and philosophy. As these two quotes demonstrate, we now see writing as idea plus execution = concept plus flow. We've...

I've been saying this for years. Running a Social Media account is a terrible way to market. It's on par with trying to market a book by selling a tee shirt. If you're selling enough shirts to make a difference in book sales, then you're probably making more off the shirts than you will the...

I follow some sword guys on TikTok, Sellsword Arts, and they talk about swordfight techniques you see in film and anime. Their favorites are either the extremely realistic ones like Princess Bride or the really cool fantasy ones like you see in Demon Slayer the anime. They hate the normal ones...

I know that my opinion on this differs from most people's. But I don't think there's much use in separating ideas and execution. There are thousands of ideas in a book. Dozens on every page. Hell, you could define a sentence as the expression of an idea. The notion that your idea is a few words...

The standard advice for a fight scene is to skimp on the blow-by-blow details and to focus on what the character is thinking and feeling as it happens. I don't like that advice. To me, it's another example of, "It's hard to do right so don't do it." A lot of the standard writing advice boils...

I just saw someone make a suggestion for going about this just today. The tip was to make about a dozen videos on a different platform than the one you're hoping to succeed at. So, like, start with Reels or something instead of Youtube. That way you can get some of the kinks out of your...

So let's break that down. 1) forced => need to be freed 2) how they were raised => see more of the world 3) friends and comrades who have fought and died => calm down to think rationally 4) fighting for a lie => see the truth 5) fighting for themselves => need a better offer 6) fighting for an...

The big question to figure out is why the character is working for the bad guy to begin with. Maybe they were forced and need to be freed, or that's just how they were raised and they need to see more of the world, or they have friends and comrades who are fighting and were even killed by the...

Writing isn't a skill. It's a bundle of different skills. Ideation, character development, the ability to comment on life, the ability to handle what feels like hundreds of different threads in your story, narrative technique, the ability to surprise people, and so on, and on, and more. That's...

I recognize this is a necromanced thread, but it's a good discussion topic that I feel like adding to. I feel that having a single project you want to emulate is an early creative stage, one that it is better to move beyond. Everything is a remix, nothing is original, so on and so forth...

I don't recall anything about the story in Metroid from the early NES/SNES games, and I missed almost everything after that, except for the more recent Metroid Dread, which was pretty cool. Metroid isn't Mario. It's got a lonely, horror and survival vibe set in deep space. Metroids are an...

The last I checked, the main place for that was still Wattpad.

I want to talk about the character Drax, from the MCU's Guardians of the Galaxy. In the first GotG movie, Drax is explicitly stated to be unable to process metaphors, and he interprets them literally. "Nothing goes over my head. I'm too fast. I would catch it." This is something of an autistic...

I did look at creating a conlang for my work, and I ended up creating a few basic rules on how their fairy language works that would be different from ours. It's more than plenty enough to play around with when it's relevant. But, after the rules I moved on. The dictionary is currently at like...

When an editor says it’s good to go, then after one last proofread. That may not be the answer you want, but there it is.