Chris Angelis's Blog, page 11
March 27, 2023
Writing a University Thesis: or, Tales from the Academic Crypt
You probably think this post isn’t for you – unless you’re a student about to start writing a university thesis. But although in this post I indeed want to give some tips to students on their way to writing a Bachelor’s, Master’s, or even Doctoral thesis, there are important things we need to discuss about […]
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March 20, 2023
How to Introduce Characters: Examples, Problems, and Genre
Whether you write short stories or novels, fantasy fiction or literary fiction, you have to deal with characters. Even experimental fiction needs some sort of characters. Is there an optimal way of introducing your characters to your audience? This might feel like a deceptively simple thing. Surely, one might think, introducing characters can’t be that […]
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March 13, 2023
The Danger of Partial Knowledge: My ChatGPT Encounter
The old piece of wisdom might be right: It’s better to know nothing about something, rather than know a little. Of course, referring to partial knowledge is a sort of misnomer. Philosophically speaking, virtually all knowledge is partial – cogito ergo sum and all that. But socially speaking, the gradations are more intriguing. The reason? […]
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March 6, 2023
Embrace Failing, or How to Live Free
I’m deliberately provocative, I fully admit. I’m asking you to embrace failing, supposedly promising you this will let you live free. Though the title isn’t a clickbait (in the sense, I really do mean it and I will argue for it), there is more nuance involved. If you’re a thinking reader, you should first and […]
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February 27, 2023
Unfinished Books: Do It the Right Way!
Unfinished books are an inevitable part of reading. Perhaps you took a chance on a completely unknown author, or perhaps something everyone else praised just wasn’t for you. If we only read books we knew we’d like, we’d never discover anything new. Indeed, in some extreme expression of this strategy, we’d never read anything. But […]
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February 20, 2023
Why I Decided to Offer All my Books for Free
I’ve offered my books for free “always”. All you had to do was email me and ask for a free, no-strings-attached copy. Perhaps you remember one earlier post, on whether art should be free. There I said how I preferred this way over permanently listing my work online for free because I wanted my readers […]
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February 13, 2023
“Kill Your Darlings” May Mean Well: It Is Still Awful Advice
You have surely heard this advice: “Kill Your Darlings”. It might mean well, as its motivation is to help you remove unnecessary text. But there’s a crucial detail: Why on earth would “darlings”, text associated with something you like, actually be unnecessary? To be fair, I need to make a differentiation here. “Kill Your Darlings” […]
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February 6, 2023
Humans Are Predictable (and That’s Fine)
All of us humans are predictable – including this very statement and this entire post. That is, it’s inherently predictable to say humans are predictable. You might have even seen a movie where a character begins to say “You can’t figure me out, I’m really…” and another character completes the phrase: “unpredictable?” Though I don’t […]
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January 30, 2023
How to Start Writing a Novel: Tips and Examples
Beginner as well as more advanced fiction writers often struggle with a seemingly simple question: How do you start writing a novel? Just to be clear, I’m not referring to the textual part – that is, narrative strategies beginning a novel; its first few paragraphs. If you’re looking for that, here are 17 ways to […]
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January 23, 2023
Conceptualizer: a Free Story Planning Program
There are fiction authors who need to plan every, single, detail in advance – they’re called “plotters”. Then there are writers who write by their seat of their pants – hence they’re called “pantsers”. In reality, most authors fall somewhere in-between. The truth is, we all need some degree of planning for most works (except […]
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