One of my favorite things about TvTropes is that there really does seem to be a trope for everything. I’ve caught up on the Cradle series by Will Wight. It’s been a wild ride. It inspired this month’s trope dive: Taste of Power. It’s a trope you’ve seen countless times before and probably didn’t know […]
This month’s tropes are brought to you by that guy in the horror movies. You know, the one who goes into the creepy basement to investigate the horrible noise. Bonus points if the power is out. Or, how about a zombie movie where the protagonists in the movie have never seen a zombie movie? Things […]
It can be strange to discuss the “mechanics” of a story. Main characters, side plots, motivations, arcs, tropes, plot devices… It almost seems taboo to break a story down into building blocks. It can seem too simplistic. To me, that’s one of the neat things about storytelling, that even using a similar set of blocks […]
I tried perusing TvTropes to see if they had a Sliding Scale to describe exactly what I was thinking of, but alas, they do not. So it falls on me to write this blog post! Originally, this article was going to be about a phenomenon within Horror and Fantasy, but I think that Sci Fi […]
So, how does a writer figure out what characters they should put in a story? We’re not talking powers necessarily here—we’re talking about personalities. The answer depends on how many main characters there are in a story. Don’t worry about villains or side characters. Just main characters—just the ones that are central protagonists. And don’t […]
Today’s tropes are brought to you by the heroes that are so brutal and questionable that they’re almost villains. Let’s preface this with a quick distinction between heroes and villains, and protagonists and antagonists. Every story has a protagonist and an antagonist, but not every story has a hero and a villain. What does that […]
How can a writer keep readers interested? Have a compelling main character with goals and flaws? Have a cunning villain who opposes the hero at every turn? Create a fleshed out world that changes and reacts to the characters’ decisions? All of those are good starts! How about killing a main character? Gasp! That’s too […]
Today’s tropes are brought to you by… well, everything. Both of them apply to books, tv shows, games, and even music–pretty much anything that tells a story. Have you ever read something so crazy that it pulled you out of the story? Sure, you may be reading a story about pirates, but the movie isn’t […]
“In any martial arts fight, there is only a finite amount of ninjutsu available to each side in a given encounter. As a result, one Ninja is a deadly threat, but an army of them are cannon fodder.” From the TvTropes page. This is one of those tropes that I think is as well known […]
There are haunted houses and then there are… well, then there’s everything else. Some of you might not be familiar with the word, eldritch. The Google definition is “weird and sinister or ghostly”. But those of you who are familiar with the word know that the definition is just the surface. TVTropes goes a bit […]
Samuel Fleming Books 