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Friday Flash 1: Eruption
Amber, liquid rock leaps toward the stars. The mountain remakes itself before their eyes. Little creatures with black and yellow scales raise their limbs in praise.
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Idea You Can Steal 1: The True Tyrant
Ideas You Can Steal are longer, meatier writing prompts. A scenario and direction for the plot are suggested, but the details and ending are completely up to you. Take this idea wholesale as a kind of outline, or cut it apart to use as inspiration for multiple projects.
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Should Critiques Be Objective?
So I’ve been thinking about critiques lately, specifically whether or not these things can be objective. Is there an objective measure for how good a piece of art is? What this measure is will vary from medium to medium, but does the presence or involvement of this measure make the critique objective?
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Writing Prompts 1
New year. New beginnings. A month of improvement and resolutions. Perhaps you’ve made one to write more? Regardless, here are some writing prompts to kickstart your creativity.
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How Do I…? Dialogue
We’ve been talking about macro-level stuff on this blog so far, but I’ve yet to dive into some of the craft of writing — the wordsmithing part that all writers should know. So I’m starting this series of posts on craft. I hope this will become a regular thing. Today’s topic is dialogue. I assume…
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Your World is an Iceberg
A question that every beginning writer asks is, “How much world building information do I need in my story? How much do I need to explain to the reader?” This comes up frequently for writers working in fantasy and science fiction, since world building is an integral part of the process. But every genre of…
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Use Randomness to Get Unstuck
So your characters are in a sticky situation, and you have no idea what happens next. Or your characters are at point A, and want to get to point B, but you don’t know what happens along the way. Instead of spending hours or days worrying over which one out of hundreds of possibilities would…
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The Problem with Inner Problems
If you stick around writers’ circles long enough, you’ll hear some variant of the following axiom: “Every hero needs both an inner and an outer problem.” These days, you’re more likely to see “protagonist” or “main character” instead of “hero”, but the concept remains the same.
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Message vs. Theme
In a previous post, I mentioned message as one of the essential ingredients for a story. I think it’s high time that I discuss what I mean by this.
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Details Tell
Creative writing involves a lot of description — of people, of places, of things, of what is happening and what has happened. Writers spend more of our time describing stuff than we’d probably care to admit.