Recent content by UnionJane

If you can get your hands on it, Swords and Dark Magic (an anthology on the sword-and-sorcery genre) has an excellent story that takes an old troupe about a magic school and truly turns it inside out. A typically serene and studious setting--a library--becomes a dangerous and possibly fatal...

It's rather difficult to isolate a book where the descriptions shine and the other elements are poorly conceived or executed. I think you'll also find it to be an issue of taste about whether or not, as a reader, you prefer lush exposition or the bare minimum. However, I could say with...

One of the fun things about language is that it's not just about vocabulary and making up your own--there are lots of little squirrelly details like dialects, syntax, and conjugation. In my stories, I try and develop a unique dialect for the area, something to give the reader a sense of the...

For an excellent and thorough discussion of villain tropes, I recommend looking to Writing the Paranormal Novel. The way the discussion is staged makes you consider villains as characters, how they work in a story, and how to put a fresh face on them.

One approach that comes to mind is that you could create your own pop culture. Whenever a group of people live and thrive near other people, culture is created. What kind of culture would a fantasy in a epic (alternative history?) fantasy create? Essentially, what is "popular", why is it that...

How to approach plot seems to usually be a matter of taste--it comes down to determining whether you want your work to be plot- or character-driven, at the most basic level. Even if the plot matches up perfectly with the main character's growth, consider how stories move. Does it seem to be the...

Given the responses I'm reading here, it seems like it might be impossible not to draw inspiration from the real world!

Being in college, I get exposed to a lot of disparate concepts, and sometimes they make their ways into my stories. I try and keep it broad in an inclusive world-building sense, such as when a poli-sci course gets me thinking about how democracy functions in today's world (and how it may work in...

I realize that most fiction tries to emulate reality, for valid reasons--so that the reader can relate to it, and see something in their selves recognizable in the story. (That's an oversimplification, but it works.) Flaws are then, naturally, something every person who lives in reality deals...

For my story, I thought a good starting point for a fatal character flaw (sticking to one for the moment, for simplicity) was to go Biblical with it. It seems like most fatal flaws can be traced back to the seven deadly sins--why not adapt one of the sins for your story? It makes the flaw easy...

My personal pet peeve is the abuse of "metaphor," which I believe is much maligned because of its application in academia. At its base, it usually defined (denotatively) as a comparison of two unlike things. In the hands of some my fellow English majors, that means that every piece of figurative...

The book... I've picked up NaNoWriMo book from the library in preparation for November. I had read it once years ago but didn't take much away from it. Now that I'm trying to write more seriously, the encouragement and stories are pretty encouraging, and well written, especially for somebody...

One of the considerations I like to that, whether writing first or third person, are the details that your character notices. Are they paying attention to certain details over another? You have to be careful not to make what your character notices simultaneous to what you as the writer notice. A...

One of the most skillful renderings of unlikable protagonists is by Joe Abercrombie, especially in The Blade Itself. The book starts out with a character who hates himself and hates what he has done--Logen Ninefingers--and spends most of the novel trying to void that fact. As the novel...

I think perhaps I am following a rather traditional route: taking the familiar and making it new in some way. Or the classic Goethe quote about finding the universal in the ordinary. Right now I'm trying to revisit the trope of dragons as beasts, when current trend has them as geniuses just...