Columns

What Works & What Doesn't: 'Badlands'

April 18th, 2016

Welcome once again to What Works & What Doesn't. Last time around we looked at Orson Welles's Citizen Kane and the construction of a sequence, the third largest building block of any screenplay (the second being sequences, the smallest being beats).

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Are 'The Jungle Books' Racist or Not? And Why You Should Read Them Either Way

April 15th, 2016

“We have made enormous progress in teaching everyone that racism is bad. Where we seem to have dropped the ball is in teaching people what racism actually is.” —Jon Stewart

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I’d Rather Talk to Hitler Than to Jesus: The Importance of the Bad Guy in Your Story

April 15th, 2016

Image Who would you rather invite to dinner – Jesus Christ or Adolf Hitler?

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Game over, man!: The Love/Hate Relationship between 'Aliens' and its Tie-In Books

April 14th, 2016

There was a time when the wait between movies in a beloved franchise was agonizing. Every rumor, however farfetched, was pored over and the years were interminable. These days, however, are an age of miracles. Star Wars is on the big screen. Marvel and DC duke it out with two or more movies per year. Whereas there was a dozen years between Terminator 2 and Terminator 3, in that same amount of time two more sequels have been made.

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Product Review: iPad Pro

April 14th, 2016

all images courtesy Apple.com Last year, Apple released the iPad Pro, an expanded version of their preexisting tablet, boasting a 12.9 inch screen and a host of other bells and whistles. Tim Cook, the company's CEO, pondered last November "...why would you buy a PC anymore?

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Finding Poetry In Computer Code

April 12th, 2016

In his 1984 book, Literate Programming, computer scientist Donald Knuth wrote, “The practitioner of literate programming can be regarded as an essayist, whose main concern is with exposition and the excellence of style. Such an author, with thesaurus in hand, chooses the names of variables carefully and explains what each variable means.”

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What An Author Reading Is And Why You Should Go To One

April 11th, 2016

Last week I went to an author reading with my partner, PoonMasterFlex. That's her chosen nickname, by the way. For the sake of this column, I'll just call her "Flex." It's shorter, less fratty, and I live in fear of the kinds of Google searches this column might pop up under if the term "PoonMasterFlex" is overused. Flex and I were walking to the reading, and when we were about halfway there, she said, "So...what's going to happen? How does this work?"

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22 of the Best Single Sentences on Writing

April 8th, 2016

There have been entire articles and books devoted to the craft of writing. And while you should definitely read at least a few of them (I personally recommend Stephen King's On Writing and Robert McKee's Story), you'll likely never find the time to read them all. Fortunately, some of the best tips out there can be whittled down to a single sentence, easily consumed and memorizable. Here are some of my favorites (22 in all, to be exact) culled from some of the biggest names in the world of fiction writing.

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6 Killer Death Scenes to Tattoo On Your Writer's Brain

April 8th, 2016

When my kids were little we had a family fun game called “Death Scenes.” We’d gather in the back yard or in the playing fields behind our house—the same fields, by the way, where Peter Jackson shot his matricide movie, Heavenly Creatures—and we’d compete to see who could die the best.

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LitReactor Community Spotlight: April 2016

April 6th, 2016

I've been thinking a lot about perspective. If you've been following politics in the US this election cycle, you probably have too. Conflict is easier for an individual to manage from a limited perspective; you can name a thousand and one reasons why your side is correct, and why the opponent is wrong. From an individual perspective, every fight is a virtuous one.

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