Posts by Mason Wheeler
The classic example of an effective Lawful Good antagonist is Inspector Javert, from Les Misérables. He is a good person who cares deeply about upholding the law, which brings him into conflict wi...
This is tricky, because you can't explain the way magic without, you know... explaining the way magic works. The trick is to make it interesting. I think one of the best examples I've seen comes ...
Two things to keep in mind. First, stereotypes exist for a reason. Pattern-matching and association are what the human brain does best, and when lots of people notice the same thing, that many ex...
You've still got plenty of room to run. For example, Elantris, Brandon Sanderson's first novel, is around 200k words, and it doesn't feel too long at all; it's big enough to tell the story being t...
Science is all about establishing rules that helps us understand how the world works. If your work is set in a different world and things in-universe work in a different way, that's fine. But her...
The first thing that comes to mind when I think about this is Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series. In the first book, our protagonists are working to bring down the empire of the Lord Ruler, an im...
One common setup for a story goes like this: We have the heroes on one side We have the villains on the other side The bad guy has an evil plot that will cause some undesirable result The heroes ...
I've really enjoyed the CW's show The Flash ever since it came out, but they recently did something that kind of feels like a mistake on the writers' part. For those unfamiliar with the show, Barr...
