Author Archives: Van Ghalta

Dialogue, monologue, and small talk are all important. Without each being clear and concise, your characters will be the most 2-D things this side of the Milky Way. These are the ways you can see the character THINK, you know. Without them, the character is literally reduced to a brainless caricature. Now, I know IContinue reading “Dialogue and Monologue”

It’s nighttime. The bats are fluttering, the animals are awake, and all the humans are in bed. At least, MOSTLY all. There’s a small sect of people, meeting in the barn to concoct a ritual sacrifice of, say, somebody’s runaway dog. This ritual is being made to please the ancient god Hio’Kranz, who is responsibleContinue reading “Crafting a Homemade Religion”

It seems like Calvin knows what he’s talking about, until we get the second half of this strip: But he’s not totally wrong. Lemme tell you a story: I’m 14 years old. I’m sitting before a lit screen with my parents and two siblings, watching the movie Train to Busan. For those of you whoContinue reading “Fishing for Inspiration”

Part of what makes so many stories cool is their backstory. Nothing’s better than walking into a sci-fi world and there are no computers because of this computer-uprising-thing they had on so-and-so a planet (Like they do in Dune). It truly separates your story from everyone else’s. The technique of “lore-ing” has been used inContinue reading “Lore 101”

As you probably know, both the beginning AND end of a story can make or break the whole work. Whoever famously said “First impressions are everything” should have added: “But last impressions are everything else.” Just as frustratingly, the two can be much easier to get wrong than to get right. However, we learn fromContinue reading “Beginnings and Endings”

In Corey Latta’s C.S. Lewis and the Art of Writing, he quotes Lewis on how his life as a reader influenced his life as a writer: “I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of windContinue reading “Today’s Readers are Tomorrow’s Writers”

Don’t be like that. Yeah, as tough as the truth may seem, you have to communicate to your readers in words. Movie producers have it easy: they don’t have to worry about some measly distinction between elevate and exasperate or heighten and anger. They have a little camera and they tell the actor to makeContinue reading “Word Use and The Thesaurus”

Ah, we’ve all been there. There just wasn’t a good reason why this character did this, or that character did what he did. So you just tie off that story with a cheap twist or unexplained event. You’re not happy with it, and neither are your readers. Maybe you can’t find a way to resolveContinue reading “Deus Ex Machina: The Writer’s Bane”

That’s the question. The word “cliché” has many meanings. It can mean “an old idiom” or “a phrase that shows a lack of original thought”, and a cliché in literary terms is not behind any of that. The phrase “curiosity killed the cat” is a cliché, but clichés as we know them (usually) carry aContinue reading “To Cliché or not to Cliché?”