The Power of Tropes
As we have seen in How Stories Really Work, there are four basic genres, each growing out of the kind of effect a writer wants to produce...
The Ups and Downs of Characters
If we go back to mythology and folklore, the hero of a story can have superhuman qualities and is often semi-divine in origin - in...
Frodo's Motivation
In all the vast tapestry that is Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, one character clearly qualifies, amongst the array of masterfully drawn...
The Sorrowful State of the Villain
Purely virtuous heroes are hard for us to feel much affinity for. What’s interesting, though, is that as we move away from the complete...
The Quality of Faerie
In 1975, my English teacher, one Mr. Sweeting, came up with the idea of a reading list from which we (his unforgiving class of...