Samuel Fleming's Blog, page 6

Monthly Obscure Trope Series — The MacGuffin

It can be strange to discuss the “mechanics” of a story. Main characters, side plots, motivations, arcs, tropes, plot devices… It almost seems taboo to break a story down into building blocks. It can seem too simplistic. To me, that’s one of the neat things about storytelling, that even using a similar set of blocks can result in wildly different stories. 

I preface with that because today we’re talking about a very broad trope, called the MacGuffin. It’s an object or thing that serves to...

So You Want to Write a Story (Appendix B) — What’s Your Mountain?

In the spirit of the bazillions of other January motivational posts…

What’s your mountain?

As a reader, it can be daunting to start a series. Sometimes the pile of books is so heavy it’s hard to carry the whole stack at one time. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not a fast reader; I’m pretty average. At my fastest, I might read a book in a week. So thinking of reading a 10 book series is daunting. Even reading a trilogy can feel that way!

As a writer, it’s a similar predicament. I l...

The Growing Chasm of Time

Life is filled with small revelations. 

I say small, because the truly grand, life changing ones are almost never experienced or digested in a single afternoon. The truly big revelations are always composed of several smaller ones. 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about time. I’ve always liked the metaphor of time as a river. Time is an ever flowing stream, pulling us along while our past recedes ever further into the horizon. 

What can I say? I’ve always been a sucker for water metapho...

The Fallacy of Perfection

There are a couple hard truths about writing, and I suppose with the creative arts in general. 

Depending on how you define it, Perfection is either unattainable or it does not exist. Sure, there are certain types of perfection, like a perfect circle… but that’s about it. Even then, when you start examining that perfect circle close enough, you can probably find tiny micromic deviations that mar it. 

So for the purposes of this blog post, what is perfection? Perfection is the idyllic stand...

The Sliding Scale of Explainability vs. Wonder

I tried perusing TvTropes to see if they had a Sliding Scale to describe exactly what I was thinking of, but alas, they do not. So it falls on me to write this blog post!

Originally, this article was going to be about a phenomenon within Horror and Fantasy, but I think that Sci Fi fits as well. 

This started with the idea of Soft vs Hard Fiction. Hard Fiction operates under the guise that everything in the world can be explained or operates on known rules or rules that can be figured out b...

So You Want to Write a Story (Part 5)

Hopefully by now you’ve not just read through the other parts of this blog series, but also practiced these things. 

A writer isn’t a writer unless they write. 

You will never finish your story–any story–unless you put butt in chair and fingers to keyboard. 

All of you who have done your practice, feel free to continue. 

We’ve gone over how to write sentence to sentence, scene to scene, and touched on how genre conventions inform our story. What’s left?

Details. And these are argu...

Monthly Obscure Trope Series — Cast Calculus

So, how does a writer figure out what characters they should put in a story? We’re not talking powers necessarily here—we’re talking about personalities.  

The answer depends on how many main characters there are in a story. 

Don’t worry about villains or side characters. Just main characters—just the ones that are central protagonists. 

And don’t worry if you weren’t any good at math in school, because Cast Calculus doesn’t involve any actual math. Not really. 

I’m going to teach yo...

So You Want to Write a Story (Part 4)

Now we’re on to the larger scales of writing: Scenes. 

So, hopefully by now you’ve read through the earlier parts on Character, Conflict, and Motivation-Reaction Units, and you’ve taken the time to practice writing some short stories. 

Yep, don’t forget that second part. Want to be a writer? Want to write a story? You need to write. And the easiest way to get started is by writing short stories. 

I don’t recommend anyone start this journey by trying to write a novel. It’s like getting u...

The Great Facebook Outage & The Importance of Direct Communication

It was October 4th, 2021, and all through the internet, people flocked to Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr, because Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were down. 

Shamelessly stolen from Reddit

It’s been interesting to see the mixed reactions to those big social media sites going down. Many people were suddenly bored out of their minds and seeking entertainment elsewhere. Political mud-slinging was put on hold. And businesses that relied on those pages were in a panic and trying to find alternat...

Monthly Obscure Trope Series Double Feature — He Who Fights Monsters & The Moral Event Horizon

Today’s tropes are brought to you by the heroes that are so brutal and questionable that they’re almost villains. 

Let’s preface this with a quick distinction between heroes and villains, and protagonists and antagonists. 

Every story has a protagonist and an antagonist, but not every story has a hero and a villain. 

What does that even mean?

In short, a protagonist is the main character of a story. The antagonist is the person in their way. For now, let’s ignore that the antagonist ...