Writing Elements

  1. Word Of The Day

    Today's word of the day is ZEN. I refound my Zen today. I didn't even know I lost it. I was mowing the lawn, giving it a scalp cut, 1st cut of the spring. This is where you cut it at the mower's lowest setting, trim off all the dead so it can grow back green for the spring. I was transfixed atop the riding mower doing a repetitive task, the drone of the engine, gentle breeze in my hair. I'm back in the groove again. A calm & peace came over me, & I was reminded of when I worked as...
  2. Temporary Blindness -True Tales

    SoberDate 8041 A couple nights ago a series of thunderstorms rolled thru our area at nighttime. Around 11pm I got up for a late night snack from the fridge (a cheese stick) when the power went out. I ate my cheese and went back to bed. Around midnight, my wife awoke to use the bathroom and the 1st thing she noticed was it was pitch black, no light from the clock, no nightlight from the bathroom, no light outside from the streetlight. Nothing, just total inky blackness. Now mind you,...
  3. Horror Story Devices via Fritz Leiber

    First some links to several online articles about how to write horror: Notes on Writing Weird Fiction by H. P. Lovecraft Supernatural Horror in Literature by H. P. Lovecraft Learning to Write Horror From Edgar Allan Poe The ‘Uncanny’ by Sigmund Freud Click "Show More Pages" at the bottom to see parts II and III. How to Write a Horror Story: 7 Tips for Writing Horror @ Reedsy What Stephen King Can Teach You About Writing Great Horror Just to once again try to consolidatre many resources...
  4. LocalScriptMan videos

    I already posted several of his videos on the topic of Character Web, but he frequently puts out great videos I want to collect where I can quickly find them. So here's a place to do that, no particular topic. What if Character Sheets weren't awful? He says he used to talk about theme (he sure did, it was all over his character web videos), but now he's moving away from that. It seems like he's working up his concepts into some kind of grand overarching narrative, a sort of universal...
  5. Writing From Life Experience

    Often when people hear you should write from your own life experience, they think of it on a very surface level—like if you played a lot of football you should write about football. In one sense this is what it means, or rather it's one aspect of it, but there's a much deeper, broader, and more universal aspect that this understanding misses. This is the aspect I want to write about—not the external things you've done (play some sport, live in a particular region or neighborhood, work on a...
  6. Getting all Emotional

    Almost a year ago I made this post: A few really good articles on Deep/Close POV A recent post on the First Three Sentences thread made me look back into it, and I read through some of the articles again. My opinion of deep POV changed several times as I learned about it, but eventually I realized it's one of those things that can be good or bad depending on how it's handled (isn't that everything related to writing?). From the second link I discovered a course. She has two modules that...
  7. Looking into the Creation of the MCU

    Don't be put off by the name of the channel (It Was a Sh*t Show)—this guy actually does a deep dive into the making of various movies, and he's extremely fair in his reporting. I think the name is mostly clickbait, though when you look deep enough, the making of most movies really is a shit show, even the ones that come out excellent. It's basically a miracle when Hollywood is able to make a good movie. He gives plenty of praise where it's due, and Marvel deserves a lot up to a certain...
  8. The Altered Self

    I hadn't heard of a sci-fi genre called The Altered Self before, or of Evolutionary Horror. And yet some of the most powerful books and movies I know of fit into one or both. I guess it's because I never really looked into sub-genres. But honestly, I don't think truly evolutionary horror would be frightening at all, since evolution takes like millions of years and affects, not you directly, but your very distant descendents. The reason these movies and stories are so intense is because it...
  9. Examining the writing in Sail and The Man Who Liked Dogs

    These are my two favorite hardboiled stories I've run across so far, both of them in the same book—The Hard Boiled Omnibus, published in 1952 and edited by Joseph T Shaw. It's a collection of some of the best stories from Black Mask magazine. I've already linked to Sail twice, but I feel I should include links here for both stories: Sail by Lester Dent The Man Who Liked Dogs by Raymond Chandler I find the beginnings of both stories to be the strongest parts. With Sail the main body almost...
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