To become a better author, you need to know when your writing smells, and what it smells of. Have you ever heard of Chekhov’s gun? No, not the one from Star Trek, the writer. Let’s discuss it, because it can make your story reek.
Martin Stellinga Posts
I saw the Avengers 2: Age of Ultron last weekend. It’s already made an obscene amount of money, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the writing is any good. I couldn’t put down my writer’s glasses even if I wanted to, so I might as well put my thoughts into a blog.
When I started writing a novel for the first time, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I made a list of cool events that led to what I considered a cool ending, then started writing. That was back in the days of the dial-up modem, when you couldn’t look up a thousand articles about writing on your smartphone. I had little knowledge about how to structure a story. I learned a lot since then, and actually finished a novel-sized story.
I experimented a lot with different ways to set up a story structure. There are a lot of ways to do that. You can follow along the lines of the monomyth, use the five-act structure, or any number of other structures. Today I’ll talk about the seven-point structure, which is a more detailed version of the three-act structure.
It’s that time of the month again, no not that, the other thing: reviews. I’ve seen and read things this month, and will now force my opinions on you.
I’ve been playing the Walking Dead, season 2, a video game about the zombie apocalypse, as you can see in the screenshot above. It got me thinking, and I’m going to take a look at the zombie apocalypse from a writer’s perspective.