Columns

Screenwriting: Insert Woman Here - Sidestepping the Sausage Fest

January 11th, 2013

Back in the day, the original Star Wars movies were a big hit at my primary school, except with the girls at recess.  As the boys galloped onto the playground eager to re-enact the destruction of the Death Star or the defeat of the Imperial forces on Endor, they had a plethora of roles to pick from, male characters of varying ages, colors and body types.

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Winter is Come: Fantasy Winters

January 10th, 2013

By now most of us have heard the saying, “Winter is Coming”, from George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. In the book and television show, it is the motto of House Stark, the guardians of the northern part of the kingdom, and those who are positioned in one of the worst places for that winter. Winters in Westeros, we’re led to believe, are bigger than just a winter on Earth, more severe, longer, lasting years. Summer at the beginning of the series has lasted nine years.

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The Joys and Perils of Self-Fictionalization as Portrayed in Four Films - or - Why We Write

January 10th, 2013

Let’s just get one thing straight—I am not a film critic, but I enjoy the storytelling process so much that I like to watch movies that place the act of making fiction at the center of the story.

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Five Plot Devices That Hurt Your Writing

January 9th, 2013

A few weeks ago, I wrote a column about some of the more predictable stories that show up in fiction workshops. This week I’d like to do something similar: I want to discuss a few popular plot devices that cause our work more harm than good.

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Notes from the Drunken Editor: You Are the Joke Here

January 9th, 2013

Are you familiar with jokes at the expense of artists? Here's one: Q: What is the difference between a large pizza and a writer? A: The pizza can feed a family. Ha! But as with any profession that's been around long enough, you don't need to look very far if you want jokes. They're often called "case studies" and they can go like this: "This person or company did this and got these results. Let's look at what happened and learn something from it."

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Organic Word-Growing: Why You Should Keep the Shit in Your Writing

January 8th, 2013

Many writers approach their text with the intent of keeping out every particle of shit. There are two drawbacks: First, this perfectionism inhibits creativity and the writing process; and second, writing that lacks the flaws naturally found in language will feel artificial. For many of us, our stories and the writing process improve when we embrace organic word-crafting, using the shit of our first draft to fertilize the drafts yet to come.

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Are You Gonna Write for Money or Art?

January 7th, 2013

Towards the end of 2012, Publishers Weekly named E L James as its Publishing Person of the Year. This nugget prompted a minor rant from me on the subsequent Unprintable podcast. My beef was that all James had done to earn the accolade was sell a lot of books. What about those, like Hilary Mantel, who stood out from the crowd because of the quality of their work?

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Lord of the Strings: The Influence of Tolkien on Heavy Metal Music

January 7th, 2013

Why do metalheads love The Lord of the Rings so much? What is it about Tolkien's mythology that has inspired countless bands to sing about wizards and orcs and elves and hobbits? Fantasy has long been considered the literature of "nerds," and metalheads have a reputation for being antisocial-- hiding away in their hobbit holes, shunning visitors and practicing scales-- but there's got to be more to it than an overlap in the Venn diagram of geek culture.

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Ask The Agent: A Look At Graphic Novel Submissions

January 7th, 2013

Navigating the rough terrain of today’s publishing industry shouldn’t be a solo event. This week in Ask the Agent, I’ll explore and dissect a few of the industry’s graphic novel mysteries. I want to talk specifically about graphic novels today. Over the past few months, I have received numerous questions regarding the submission of graphic novels to agents, so I decided to dedicate this particular Ask The Agent to some of those questions.

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10 Questions with Ed Sikov... by Ed Sikov

January 4th, 2013

The Boys’ and Girls’ Little Book of Alcohol, Ed Sikov’s first work of fiction, has just been published by Vook. It’s a novella with annotated cocktail recipes, and its central character is a former film studies professor named Ed, who writes a syndicated column about cocktails. LitReactor thought it might be fun to have our intrepid columnist Ed Sikov interview Ed. Unfortunately, most of what Ed had to say was unusable; here’s what we managed to salvage.

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