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How to Get Writing Advice Successfully

March 7, 2022

author, book, fiction, literature, writing

This is quite the meta-post: I’ll be offering you advice on how to successfully get writing advice. More maddeningly, perhaps, I’ll be partly asking you to ignore writing advice – advice which you’d have to ignore in order… not to ignore it. There are no simple answers, sorry!

Overall, what this little linguistic and conceptual wizardry underlines is:

Writing fiction is a complex process; it’s both art and isn’t.
Crucially, a certain level of critical thinking is required in order to know what advice to follow.

This latter part is what I’ll be focusing on in this post. I’ll offer you tools that will help you know what to do so that you get writing advice successfully. That is, what to do so that any writing advice you’re getting is actually helping you instead of misleading you.

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How to Write Fantasy Fiction: Examples of Characters, Tropes, and Plots

February 28, 2022

Fiction Writing Tips, Writing

book, creativity, fantasy, fiction, genre, literature, writing

As you might know, I don’t write genre fiction; I write literary fiction. My books – as you can see on the relevant page of the main site – are about “ordinary” people in “ordinary” circumstances (I let you interpret the quotation marks the way you want). However, my academic expertise is on nonrealist fictions: Gothic/horror, science fiction, fantasy. So let’s put this expertise to good use (it doesn’t seem to have its own space in the academic world) and see how to write fantasy fiction, with examples on characters, tropes and plots.

I’ll try to make this post as detailed and useful, but at the same time as accessible as possible. Personally, I’m a great fan of simplicity. I believe that if you can’t explain a concept – no matter how complex – in a way a 10-year-old could understand it, it means you haven’t fully understood it yourself.

With this in mind, here’s a quick outline of what I’ll show you in this post:

How to write fantasy fiction characters. In particular, what is the role of characters in fantasy fiction
Examples of tropes. That’s a somewhat fancy way of saying how to write fantasy fiction in a way your intended audience can relate to it. In a sense, it’s a marketing consideration, but also with artistic dimensions.
What kind of fantasy fiction plots are worth pursuing and what are best left alone. And why.

I don’t have all the answers. Heck, I don’t even have all the questions. But whatever I know and share with you, I genuinely hope it can help you!

One misconception about how to write fantasy fiction is that fantasy allows you to write pretty much anything you want. Technically true, practically false

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Southern Gothic Tropes: Meaning “Beyond the South”

February 21, 2022

Criticism

academia, criticism, Gothic

The so-called “Southern Gothic” is a subcategory of the Gothic mode that nominally revolves around the American South – as in, the Southern US States. However, as we’ll see in this post, Southern Gothic tropes far exceed the strict topical confines of the American South. Indeed, understanding these Southern Gothic tropes can reveal hidden meaning in a vast literary space.

As is the case with the Gothic in general, the Southern Gothic, too, is difficult to pinpoint. Perhaps paradoxically, considering its (again, nominal) narrow focus, the Southern Gothic describes not a place but an experience. Though Southern Gothic tropes are generally well-defined, as we’ll soon see, their metaphorical dimensions and repercussions are far more flexible.

In simpler words: The Southern Gothic isn’t about the US South.

So, let’s take an analytic but accessible look at this intriguing subcategory of the Gothic mode. We’ll start with a basic outline of Southern Gothic tropes, and then I’ll explain what these tropes really signify. As a result, we’ll discover why the Southern Gothic framework can inform our reading of a vast number of other narratives.

Southern Gothic Tropes — As with so many other things in literature, Southern Gothic tropes are more about the “how it feels”, **affect**, rather than the “what it is”

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