Dread Writing Sexy Scenes? 5 Tips for Success
Whatever genre we write, we often have to write scenes that make us uncomfortable. For many, sexy scenes are high on that discomfort scale.
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Antagonists: How to Avoid Boring Villains — Guest: Kristen Lamb
In Kristen Lamb’s guest post series on antagonists, we’ve talked a lot about the non-evil, non-villain style of antagonists. Today we’re finally(!) focusing on the villain and how we can avoid mustache-twirling by giving them depth.
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Antagonists: What’s Driving Our Story? — Guest: Kristen Lamb
We’ve explored how antagonists act as the conflict-engine for our story, but our Big Boss Troublemaker isn’t in every scene. What keeps the rest of our story going? Kristen’s going to teach us today about scene antagonists.
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Conflict: Why It Isn’t Just about Fighting — Guest: Janice Hardy
We’ve been talking about antagonists lately, and how some writers minimize the conflict in their stories, even though “good fiction is the path of greatest resistance.” In a perfect bit of serendipity, a guest post by Janice Hardy today addresses the most common myth about conflict.
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Antagonists: The End-All-Be-All of Our Story — Guest: Kristen Lamb
Over the past couple of weeks, Kristen Lamb has been kind enough to let me share her insights on antagonists: what they are, why they help define our story, how to strengthen them, etc. Today, we’re exploring how antagonists create our story from beginning to end.
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Antagonists: Inner & Outer Demons — Guest: Kristen Lamb
In a “man vs. self” story, we can’t just show a character arguing with themselves. Instead, Kristen shows us how to use a technique like in the movie Black Swan—where the outward antagonists represent the protagonist’s own issues.
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Antagonists: “He’s His Own Worst Enemy” — Guest: Kristen Lamb
Sometimes, we’ll say that a character is their own worst enemy, such as the “man versus himself” story premise. However, those stories use proxies to provide a face for the opposition. Today, we’re going to dig deeper into this idea of man versus self to better understand the concept.
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Antagonists: What Is an Antagonist? — Guest: Kristen Lamb
All great stories are about one thing and one thing only—problems. More specifically? Every good story has one core problem in need of being resolved. Today, Kristen Lamb shares her insights into how problems, conflicts, and antagonists drive our story.
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Story Tropes: What’s the Subtext?
A story’s meaning and hidden messages often lurk in the subtext. Subtext flows throughout our plots, characters, themes, genres…and story tropes. Depending on how we use and twist story tropes, we might create very different messages for readers.
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Story Tropes: Lazy or Helpful?
Every genre and medium of storytelling uses tropes, and they often have a bad reputation—for good reason. All too frequently, they can indicate lazy storytelling or worldbuilding. But they don’t have to be a bad thing.
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