Writing

Improve Your Storytelling with Playwriting Techniques

Using a structure with acts and scenes, paying attention to blocking, and keeping dialogue goal-oriented and lively are all lessons novelists can learn from playwrights.

What Are the Different Book Genres?

Writers often struggle with how exactly to describe their stories to other people. They may get asked, “What genre is your book?” and they get stumped trying to give a pithy answer to encompass an entire universe and cast of characters they had built up in their imaginations! Stories come in many different flavors, and some of those flavors are called genres.

Representation in Fiction: How to Write Characters Whose Experiences Are Outside of Your Own

As publishing endeavors to address inclusion and diverse representation in fiction, an inevitable question arises: Can authors write characters whose experience is outside of their own?

ConCrit in Comments Only: What Writing Fanfiction Taught Me as an Editor

Writing skills don’t always have to come from an MFA or out of how-to books. Sometimes they can be gathered together from the most unexpected places.

Here’s what this editor learned from writing fanfiction.

Leftist Constructs: The radicalism of steampunk

Steampunks tend not to idealise the past, despite being fascinated by this conflicted history. Just as cyberpunk – the sci-fi term that inspired Jeter’s ‘steampunk’ – involved conflict with shady multinational corporations and the authoritative state in a techno-infused future, today’s steampunk community flips the bird at Victorian norms, dismantling history and exposing it as the construct that it is. In steampunk, colonised nations overthrow empires, mechanical innovation ends slavery or child labour, women don corsets on the outside of their dresses and become adventurers independent of men.

The Ao Dai and I: A Personal Essay on Cultural Identity and Steampunk

Steampunk can be more than simple cultural nostalgia about the way things were or a rebellion against the past (which, unless we really are time travelers, is nothing more than an intellectual exercise). Steampunk is ourselves today, holding the past in our hands, and asking, “How did we get here?” It can be as tangible as gears and dirt and cloth. It’s how we present ourselves, even if we come with nothing but the clothes on our backs.