Message Mixology
When I was taking a mediocre English class, one of the things that I was taught, one of the things I subsequently rejected, was that a story must have a message. Some while afterwards, I changed my mind: I decided…
Tag Narrative
Shifting Personae
I don’t know how anything ever gets created. The moment a single creative decision gets made, everything shifts around it. If you’re writing a story and a character has a little two-paragraph flashback, the information contained therein affects every other…
Rewriting The Ending
Nowadays, opportunities to express misanthropic and cynical viewpoints are thick on the ground – cruel and duplicitous politicians who still bafflingly find true believers, fantastical and murderous conspiracy theories, betrayals and close-mindedness, callousness and cruelty everywhere. It makes so much…
Sleep Paralysis
I still like the film Inception. This is not an unusual opinion, it was a huge blockbuster hit, but in general the film seems to have diminished somewhat in the public estimation in the decade since its release. Many of…
Miniature
Stories are terrifyingly powerful in a way we frequently don’t notice. Everyone knows the difference between fiction and reality, or they think they do – and, indeed, they probably know the difference between real and fictional events, but that’s not…
Meaning
When we search for meaning in an uncaring universe, what is it we search for? Meaning isn’t an object that can be found, isn’t an inherent trait of anything, isn’t even a truth that can be discovered – meaning is…
Low Visibility
Today I was buying groceries along with my mom – she has a working car and I do not. After leaving her for a bit to find something I missed in the last aisle, I started heading back to where…
Tension
A few weeks ago I wrote about how insufficient the idea of all stories being rooted in conflict is – actually, I mostly wrote about how our assumption that conflict is the core of stories affects the way we design…
Music and Meaning
I feel like there’s a hole in the way we discuss soundtracks. We talk about using certain instruments or techniques to evoke certain kinds of emotions and associations without ever talking about the specifics of how we do that and…
War Stories
America has a relationship with violence that is, let’s say, a little too friendly. That’s not to say that the American mindset is violent necessarily, that we are predisposed to do violence, but that so much of our outlook is…