Category Archives: monsters

MAKE THEM EARN IT

Posted on January 31, 2023 by Philip Athans

Your characters need to earn the things they need to succeed in their own stories. Don’t let anything come too easily, and in most genre fiction, at least, I mean anything and everything must feel that it came at the cost of significant effort. If not, it’s not … Continue reading →

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2023: THE YEAR OF PHIL (FOR REAL THIS TIME)

Posted on January 3, 2023 by Philip Athans

I think I proclaimed 2020 as the Year of Phil on Twitter, then doubled down in 2021… and I think we all know what those years ended up being instead—anything but Years of Phil. But the Year of Phil is too … Continue reading →

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WHY? THE HEART OF CHARACTER MOTIVATION

Posted on October 11, 2022 by Philip Athans

The truest anger or distress is conveyed by authors who actually feel anger or distress in their soul. Thus the best writers are those who are either highly gifted or insane. —Aristotle, The Poetics A good fiction author is at least … Continue reading →

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MAYBE I NEED TO CHEER UP

Posted on August 9, 2022 by Philip Athans

I continue to struggle with what I guess I can call “writer’s block.” I do write this blog every week, the occasional poem, even finished the (very) rough draft of a short story yesterday, but the novel continues to elude … Continue reading →

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I WILL WRITE THAT NOVEL

Posted on March 15, 2022 by Philip Athans

I’ve written here before that we should remind ourselves that writing fiction—especially genre fiction—should be fun, that we should get in touch with a sense of play—and in recent weeks this has come back to me for a few different reasons. … Continue reading →

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HOW TO START WRITING

Posted on February 8, 2022 by Philip Athans

Endings are hard, pacing is hard, believable characters are hard, dialog is hard… the whole damn thing is hard. Sometimes the hardest part (at least until you get to the next hardest part) is getting started in the first place. … Continue reading →

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DEFINING MY TERMS

Posted on January 11, 2022 by Philip Athans

It’s rather funny how a word sometimes sneaks into a family and gets itself adopted. Where does it come from, I wonder? I’d very much like to know. —Jean Cocteau, Intimate Relations (Les parents terribles) In pretty much all of my writing … Continue reading →

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A WEIRD STORY MINI-FORMULA

Posted on December 21, 2021 by Philip Athans

In my look, last April, at the book Science Fiction Handbook, Revised, by L. Sprague de Camp & Catherine de Camp (Owlswick Press, 1975), I wrote: Speaking of the pulp tradition, the de Camps quote Jack Williamson and Edmund Hamilton’s “formula” for a science fiction story … Continue reading →

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GROUP POV? NO. JUST… NO.

Posted on October 26, 2021 by Philip Athans

Do I even need to go on? Please believe me that I’m not a rules-monger when it comes to creative writing. I want to read great stories told in fresh and fascinating ways. If that means a copy editor at The … Continue reading →

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DOES FANTASY HAVE TO BE MEDIEVAL?

Posted on June 1, 2021 by Philip Athans

I’m going to answer that right away: No, it doesn’t. By now we’ve all read “urban fantasy”—stories set in the contemporary world but with the addition of magic and monsters—or historical fantasy set in Victorian times, or combined with the … Continue reading →

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