Samuel Fleming's Blog, page 7

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 ...

Writing needs to be Fun

This is a companion post to Writing is a War of Attrition, but it’s also a cornerstone post for ALL fiction writers. Non-fiction writers, you guys are in a slightly different boat. 

Writing needs to be fun. 

Not should be fun or can be fun. Not writing is fun sometimes. 

Writing needs to be fun. 

This isn’t some repetitive job or trial and error puzzle you can brute force your way through. Writing is a creative endeavor. Something that you need to both be present for and get out of t...

Writing is a War of Attrition — Publishing doubly so

If you’ve been following this blog, then you might’ve seen earlier posts where I compared writing and publishing to running a marathon. That metaphor still stands, but I want to explore this one. 

Why use multiple metaphors when one would do? When I coached swimming, it was common to explain the same drill multiple ways so that all the kids understood. Some kids just got certain explanations and not others. A cue would work for one swimmer and not another. Hence multiple metaphors for writing...

So You Want to Write a Story (Appendix A) — Getting started with Fan Fiction and Solo Journaling Games

Now that you have a little background on how to write, how do you get started? How do we go from a blank page to figuring out what to write about?

Rather than talking about inspiration, I want to show you a few ways to get started. Today we’re going to talk about two shortcuts you can use to jumpstart your writing: Fan Fiction and Solo Journaling Games. 

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last two decades, you’ve probably heard about fan fiction — Any story written by a fan of,...

Monthly Obscure Trope Series — Red Shirts

How can a writer keep readers interested?

Have a compelling main character with goals and flaws? Have a cunning villain who opposes the hero at every turn? Create a fleshed out world that changes and reacts to the characters’ decisions?

All of those are good starts!

How about killing a main character? 

Gasp! That’s too far. After all, we put dozens, or even hundreds of pages into developing this main character and getting the readers to care about them. It’s not even the end of the b...

So You Want to Write a Story (Part 3)

Last time on part Part 2, we talked about how Character and Setting give birth to Conflict, which is the “push” for our Character to move through the story. 

Now that we have our characters and our setting, and have a sense of what direction/goal they have (via Conflict), how do we move the characters through the setting, both in time/space and narratively? We do this both scene by scene and sentence by sentence. 

The largest scale movement in a story is plot, or scene by scene movement. T...

So You Want to Write a Story (Part 2)

During Part 1 of this series, we touched briefly on how choosing a viewpoint character and setting can drastically change the type of story or genre that we’re telling. Also, now might be a good time to brush up on Genre Expectations, if you haven’t read that one. 

We’re going to continue this tangent today to its next logical step: How Character and Setting give birth to Conflict. 

All stories come down to this premise: The Character wants something, but something else is in the way. This...

Monthly Obscure Trope Series Double Feature — The Willing Suspension of Disbelief & The Rule of Cool

Today’s tropes are brought to you by… well, everything.  Both of them apply to books, tv shows, games, and even music–pretty much anything that tells a story.  

Have you ever read something so crazy that it pulled you out of the story?  Sure, you may be reading a story about pirates, but the movie isn’t historically accurate.  Maybe you’re willing to overlook some of those things for the sake of the story.  We call this the Willing Suspension of Disbelief. Basically, it’s the idea that the au...

MONTHLY OBSCURE TROPE SERIES DOUBLE FEATURE — THE WILLING SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF & THE RULE OF COOL

Today’s tropes are brought to you by… well, everything.  Both of them apply to books, tv shows, games, and even music–pretty much anything that tells a story.  

Have you ever read something so crazy that it pulled you out of the story?  Sure, you may be reading a story about pirates, but the movie isn’t historically accurate.  Maybe you’re willing to overlook some of those things for the sake of the story.  We call this the Willing Suspension of Disbelief. Basically, it’s the idea that the au...

So You Want to Write a Story (Part 1)

What makes a story?  

I propose that you can boil it all down to a couple things:  Character, setting, conflict, scenes/action.  

A story is nothing more than a Character in a Setting.  Conflict arises because that Character wants something that they don’t have (yet).  Each Scene of your story has Action of some kind (be it physical, emotional, internal, etc) and all Action either increases the level of conflict or moves the character closer to their goal.  

This first post is going to ...