Featured Author – Page 7 – Mythic Scribes Test Site

5 Ways to Build Stronger Characters

This article is by Anne Marie Gazzolo.

It’s possible to build characters who achieve a secondary reality, and become people who live in their own right in our hearts and minds.

It jars me every time someone says Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee are ‘characters.’ I want to shout, “They are not characters! They are people!”

J. R. R. Tolkien’s masterful essay “On Fairy-Stories” is must reading for anyone who wishes to practice, as he calls it, the “elvish craft” of sub-creating secondary worlds that achieve a reality of their own. I wish to add some thoughts from my own travels in Middle-earth and a galaxy far, far away, that I hope will help you to build ‘characters’ who are truly more than that.

Names in Fantasy – 3 Ways to Invent Names for Characters and Creatures

by Featured Author

This article is by Grace Robinson.

People sometimes ask me how I come up with names for my fantasy stories – names of characters, as well as names of creatures, places, and things.

I don’t have a standard formula for inventing names, but after doing some thinking, I realized that there are three main methods I use.

I believe that many authors use these methods in one way or another:

Focused Ambiguity: Using Metaphor in Fantasy Writing

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This article is by Walter Rhein.

There is an inherent paradox in the phrase “focused ambiguity”. Yet the disconnect achieved by putting those two words together approximates the mental state necessary for writing good fantasy.

One of the big mistakes a lot of new writers make in their world building is too much of a focus on practical construction. However, unless the overall theme of your fantasy book is economics, you really don’t need to explain how your “diamond city in the desert” gets enough drinking water to support its population.

An effective novel always has a strong connective thread, and, in fantasy, every character, setting, and action can be molded to function as an integral part of the extended metaphor that supports the novel’s overall theme.

How To Hook Your Audience

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This article is by Craig W. Van Sickle & Steven Long Mitchell.

While novels, graphic novels, television or motion picture scripts each present writers with different formats, narrative challenges and audience expectations, they all have one very simple commonality at their heart: telling a great story that hooks, pulls in and holds its consumer.

Simple, right? Well, as they say in novel writing circles, if writing were easy, everyone would be Stephen King.

Truth is, no matter what medium, defining and learning how to hook your audience can actually be very simple if we just break down the elements of storytelling into small, manageable segments.

Fantasy and How the World Ought To Be

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King_Aragorn — Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn

This article is by Christian Madera.

Early Fantasy literature, with its black-and-white morality, was very comfortable making statements about ethics. I’m using ‘ethics’ in a broad sense here: I don’t just mean questions about what a person should do in a difficult situation (though such questions are definitely a mainstay of Fantasy literature and merit discussion), but rather broader questions about how a person should be and how the world should be.

Recently, we’ve seen a backlash against black-and-white morality and a move towards so-called “grey” Fantasy. While I think it is very important to be cognizant of and think critically about the potential pitfalls of black-and-white Fantasy, I would argue that grey Fantasy is not without pitfalls of its own.

5 Essential Publishing Skills

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This article is by T.L. Bodine.

Self-publishing can certainly seem like the easier route to take when it comes to getting your words in front of readers. After all, there are no gate-keepers – no agents to court, no publishers to approach.

With the click of a button, your book can be released into the ether for anyone to come across. And if the traditional path to publication seems daunting, it can be comforting to think that going indie will be easy.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. There’s a big difference between publishing a book and actually getting people to read it, and many of the things readers are looking for are exactly the things agents and acquisition editors want as well. As it turns out, most of the key skills needed for landing an agent are very similar to those for hooking readers.

5 Reasons Why Narration Can Work in Fiction

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This article is by Anne Marie Gazzolo.

Authors can use narrators in many different ways to add value to any story. Among them, they can speak directly and indirectly to their audience, inform the readers of things not even the characters inside the story know, give a look into the heart and soul of the heroes and villains, and praise or condemn them for their actions.

Here are five reasons why you should consider using one:

Navigating the Self-Publishing Fandango

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This article is by Cate Morgan.

There’s no doubt about it: there is a lot of noise out there in the crowded, Dread Interwebz when it comes to what I refer to as the Self-Publishing Fandango.

It’s like a tango in the respect that it sounds sexy at the outset, and certainly looks sexy when it’s done by trained professionals. But without full knowledge of the steps, it can turn violent in terms of tangled legs, stepped-on toes, and ballistic stilettos impaling innocent bystanders. In other words, disappointing and not pretty for all concerned.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. We all know the publishing landscape has changed dramatically with the wide acceptance of eBooks and the wild popularity of the Kindle. That’s not news. What is news is authors’ perspectives changing right along with it, and as dramatically as a sudden stiletto to the eye.