Fiction Craft Blog

It's very common for newer fantasy writers to focus heavily on worldbuilding and much less on developing their characters. After all, worldbuilding is the main draw of fantasy and speculative fiction more widely, and novels in all genres have characters. Older fantasy novels often had quite flat, undeveloped characters. The current Anglo-American market for fantasy fiction has moved on, though. The popularity of Romantasy links to the increased importance of strong emotional

Many authors find fight scenes notoriously difficult to write. Maybe you just skipped the fight scene chapter until last? Or maybe you haven’t even written it yet? Sound familiar? If so – and you’ve written a science fiction or fantasy novel – then this blog post is for you. So why are fight scenes tricky to write? Well, they’re usually high stakes and the outcome is crucial to the plot. In a fight scene, every sentence counts, and most authors don’t have lots of personal fig

What if immersive virtual reality technologies existed and were really really good? Better than the real world, in fact? Ernest Cline's novel – awesome and icky in equal measure – explores a future world with dystopic elements, in which teams are hunting for easter eggs that Halliday, the inventor of this VR world, has embedded in the code. The story is told through the eyes of Wade Watts (online avatar: Parzival) – an orphaned teenager living in the ‘stacks’ in Ohio, the mid