Stories are all about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. They are about giving their audiences new perspectives and opening their minds to the myriad of possibilities life throws at us. And as we have mentioned before, perspectives can be very powerful within the stories we tell. Write a scene from nature—but write it first…
Have you ever seen those videos on YouTube where an artist takes multiple clips from a specific movie and rearranges them to create trailers for it across different genres? While most fiction pieces tend to fit tightly within one particular genre, a good story always has several other elements lying just beneath the surface, and…
My favorite Star Trek episode of all time is “Darmok,” in which Captain Picard and the Enterprise crew encounter an alien race that communicates entirely through metaphors and allegories. Near the end of the episode, Picard and the other ship’s captain end up exchanging stories from their home worlds in order to establish a way…
For those who do not know, the word “trope” has come to refer to a commonly recurring device used in storytelling. This could be a theme, a type of character, a situation, etc. that has been overdone to the extent that we’ve come to recognize them almost as soon as we see them—and we very…
A while ago I posted a book review for Vampires, Hearts, and Other Dead Things by Margie Fuston. And while my thoughts on the story overall were not exactly positive, there were a couple things about it that I really liked. One of them was the way the main character, Victoria—who also happens to be…