A Darker Shade of Magic is an extraordinarily fun book. V.E. Schwab crafts an exceedingly enjoyable, vivid world whose sheer concept feels pulled from the wishes of my younger, Victorian-lit-and-anime-loving-self.…
Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women gives us an amazing chance to discuss narrative distance, pacing, and authorial intent in writing. This is, in part, because it didn’t really…
Well-written villains have a magic that makes a story pop. Despite this, some writers have trouble getting into their villains' heads, and many readers and viewers fail to fully understand…
What Makes a Good Villain? (Part 2 Available Here) Nothing makes a work of fiction stand out like a memorable, well-written villain. The great ones can be the highlight of…
Toni Morrison’s Jazz is, simply put, a masterpiece. The prose is spectacular, with a rhythm and life that demands you slow down and listen. The characters are incredibly real, layered,…
Hello, all! This is the last blog post I’ll be writing before Halloween, so I decided to write about something spooky: Rosemary's Baby, the much beloved horror classic by Ira…
Naming characters is hard, and not nearly as fun as telling their stories. And, often, it’s not just less fun… it gets in the way of writing. Some writers freeze…
It can’t be stressed, enough: Terry Pratchett was ahead of his time. In Equal Rites (the third novel in the Discworld series), Terry Pratchett uses his wit, humor, and grand…
Literary fiction has a bad reputation for being low on the “entertain-o-meter,” a completely imaginary device that I pretend to use to measure how engaging a novel is. So, it…
(Quick heads-up before we start: this article contains some light spoilers for the endings to both The Light Fantastic and The Color of Magic.) The Light Fantastic is the second…