I recently studied a Jason Bourne fight scene in The Bourne Identity to learn all I could about writing a good fight.
Tag: writing
How I Wrote a Character-Driven Story
I had to begin not with a fully outlined plot, but with a fully-fleshed person.
Building and Fixing Your Causal Chain
Have you received feedback saying that your characters feel manipulated by the author? If so, you might have a broken causal chain.
Why Writing the Other is Always Radical (Part I)
Photo by Ali Arif Soydaş on Unsplash Writing the other is an inherently political act, especially when the dominant culture wants to turn the other into a “them.” An “us” is a person of dignity with whom we can empathize and recognize as a human being. An “us” is someone we can relate to and …
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Harness the Power of Dialectical Opposites to Enhance Your Storytelling
The inherent rule behind storytelling is to be found in dialectics.
How to Write a Fully-Rounded Adventure Story Protagonist
Are you writing adventure fiction? Samuel Delany has suggestions on how to writer more credible main characters.
My Critters List of the 5 Most Common Weaknesses in Fiction
Ever since I became serious as a freelance editor/proofreader and a participant on Critters.org, the oldest online writer's critique group, I have encountered the same weakness in fiction over and over again. Partly, I think this is because people send early drafts to critiques and forego revision until they receive their first round of feedback. …
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How T.E. Lawrence Came to Many-Pillared Iram
Today's post is another YouTube video, in which you will get to listen to my own reading of a piece of short fiction I wrote for the Mythgard Institute "Almost an Inkling" creative writing contest. The contest is still going on, but now that the current week's voting is over, I was really enthusiastic to share this …
Continue reading How T.E. Lawrence Came to Many-Pillared Iram
Joseph Boyden on his Identity and Origins
Monday at the D.B. Clarke Theatre in the Hall Building on Concordia University campus, Joseph Boyden talked about his identity and origins--both as a writer and a man of mixed Irish-Ojibwe blood. He was accompanied by renowned conversationalist Kate Sterns and Globe and Mail book reviewer Jared Bland, "Who are you?" opened Sterns, a direct …
Elegant Eliminations
An elimination is a poetic form where you don't write the words. You erase them. Take any stanza or paragraph with a rich, evocative vocabulary. I for example chose a few pages from James Frazer's classic work of anthropology The Golden Bough. Any other kind of text can fit just as well as any other--the …
Matthew Rettino 