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Oren is a grumpy old man whose physical age hasn’t quite caught up with him, at least that’s what the kids who won’t get off his lawn keep saying. He’s been into roleplaying games since he was knee-high to a d10, and into prose writing for nearly as long. He loves stories and games that push the envelope of storytelling, like the Discworld series and the RPG Primetime Adventures. He’s also a huge Star Trek fan, though his rants on the mistakes of Voyager and Enterprise might make you think otherwise.
Is something bad going to happen? Will the hero make that jump? Will the villain foreclose on the orphanage? That tight feeling you get thinking about those questions is called tension, and it’s a critical element of storytelling. So critical, we’re devoting an entire episode … read more »
Organizations play a critical role in speculative fiction. They allow for bigger plots and higher stakes than are feasible with individual characters. However, they are also uniquely challenging. When crafting fictional organizations, storytellers must consider what the organization does, how it operates, where its resources … read more »
What is the topic of this week’s episode? No one knows. You’ll have to collect clues and interview suspects to find out. It’s a total mystery! Which fits, because the topic of this episode is mystery stories. Listen as we discuss how important the final … read more »
Everyone loves a good mystery. But mystery stories have a common problem: no satisfaction at the end. That’s because everything in the story leads to a big reveal about whodunit. Reveals are always tricky to pull off, so if the story’s not firing on all cylinders, … read more »
Dear Oren/Chris, I’m an amateur fantasy writer and a rising college freshman working on the second draft of a high fantasy novel. Some context for the question: 1. The main character lives on a different continent than the magical school she ends up going to, … read more »
Some topics are so good they just keep coming back, almost as if they won’t stay dead, which is why today we’re talking about resurrections. You’ve probably heard that bringing a character back from the dead will create problems for your story, and it certainly … read more »
Recently, I went over the naval tactics your characters might use in a world without gunpowder. This raises the natural question, what happens when gunpowder is introduced? As you might imagine, the answer is complicated. Gunpowder isn’t a single toggle switch. There are hundreds, possibly … read more »
Hi! Sorry to spam your inbox. I promise to get it out of my system! With the goal of creating a fantasy world in which the forms of oppression and discrimination we see in our world and history are absent, I am pretty sure I … read more »
In the land between writer and reader, there lies the copy editor. But what is a copy editor? What do they do? For that matter, what do they not do? That’s our topic for this week, and with at least one copy editor on the … read more »
Conflict between characters is a vital tool of storytelling, but it can also be tricky, especially when both characters are on Team Good. Authors often have difficulty constructing conflicts where neither character is obviously at fault, or they have difficulty dealing with the implications when … read more »