Category: The Writer’s Craft
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PulpRev’s Wicked Problem
A couple of weeks ago over dinner, Troy Tang and I discussed some of the fundamental problems facing PulpRev. PulpRev makes for a fine umbrella term for writers to rally around, but every writer has different ideas about the direction of their own writing. This makes it hard for people to define what, exactly, is…
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Is There A Place for Morally Ambiguous Characters?
Last week, Rawyle Nyanzi wrote about black and white morality in fiction, and JD Cowan expanded on why readers love them . Characters with clear moral codes make for compelling reading. Armed with an uncompromising view of right and wrong, they act decisively against evil wherever they find it. Yet, fettered by their same uncompromising…
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Lessons from Short Manga
Japanese manga is (in)famous for long-running series. Popular titles like One Piece, Hajime No Ippo and Naruto span hundreds of chapters and dozens of volumes. Even lesser-known titles may be graced with lifespans running to the low hundreds. This phenomenon is perfectly understandable: in the cut-throat profit-driven world of Japanese manga, the easiest way to make more money is to…
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What Makes a Hero?
A couple of days ago, Rawle Nyanzi made a thoughtful post about virtue and heroism. I think he hit the nail on the head by attacking the notion that heroism and villainy are subjective. Heroes can be found in every corner of the globe. From Chinese wuxia tales to Western knights-errant, classical Japanese samurai to modern day manga…
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Reflections on the Pulp Revolution
A fortnight ago, Jesse Abraham Lucas wrote a blog post that resonated with me. He wrote about what PulpRevvers call GroffinGate, in which an Internet commentator named Groffin said (among other things): And for all your glorification of the insular and self-aggrandizing indie-literature circuit, you have no minds of comparable skill or prestige, and will not for…
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How Poor Worldbuilding Destroyed Talentless Nana
The more fantastic a story, the greater the need for justification. To write a technothriller about a covert ops team hunting down terrorists, all you have to do is say that the government created new counterterrorist organisation with the best training and technology to pursue evildoers, and a reader will happily lap it up. But…