I have long been a fan of Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat! as an excellent resource on storytelling, and plot in particular. This week, in preparation for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), author Bethany Myers posted an article titled Plot Like A Pro, a creative piece applying Snyder’s 15 elements of story structure to Harry…
A while back, I was doing research on Vikings for my next novel, which will be the sequel to Enoch’s Device. In the course of that research, I spent some time on Norse mythology, since many a tenth-century Viking would have clung to the worship of Thor or Odin instead of embracing the Christian faith…
The folks at Middle-Earth News previewed two TV spots for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which will debut in December. One of the spots is featured below. You can view the other one here. Meanwhile, Andrew Russo of Scifi Bloggers published an article on the demise of the TV show Heroes titled How Heroes Devolved:…
This week, author Marie Brennan, at Science Fiction & Fantasy Novelists, wrote an interesting post on portal fantasies, titled This Wardrobe Closed Until Further Notice. The premise is that agents and publishing houses have no interest in portal tales — those stories where a character from our world goes through some looking glass or other…
Like the news-bearing heralds of old, Fresh-scraped Vellum is becoming a bit more newsy, albeit in a potentially wayward fashion. So every Monday for the foreseeable future, the Wayward Herald will report on news and items of interest to readers and writers of historical and fantasy fiction. For his inaugural post, here are some interesting…
In the final installment in my series on the Top 5 Elements of a Great Epic, I’m focusing on Grand Events – those major conflicts that makes a great epic so breathtaking. Grand events are critical because they are a primary vehicle through which the author shows how huge the stakes are in the story. They…
Every story needs a protagonist, and often he or she possesses qualities that could be described as “heroic.” A great epic, however, needs a hero in the truest sense of the word. Just look at three of the first four definitions in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary to see what I mean: Definition of HERO a mythological…
Great epics are never about a single character’s journey. Even if the stakes are enormous for that one character, rarely would such a story be described as epic. In great epics, many characters must be in peril, and sometimes the fate of whole nations, or even whole worlds, are at issue in the story. The…
I’m slammed with work this week, so my next installment of the Top 5 Elements of a Great Epic needs a little more time and attention. For now, here’s my first post about epics from August 2011. This summer has been huge for George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. First, HBO made…
This week’s “beginning” comes from Hood, Stephen R. Lawhead’s reimagination of the Robin Hood myth. For those who haven’t read my post on Legends Reimagined, Hood features “Robin” as a Welsh freedom fighter during the Norman Conquest. Here is how it begins: The pig was young and wary, a yearling boar timidly testing the…
Among the Top 5 Elements of a Great Epic, setting is at the top of my list. Great stories, of course, can take place in a very limited setting. Stephen King’s The Mist, which largely takes place in a convenience store, and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, which primarily takes place in the protagonist’s home,…