The Number One Ingredient You Need to Tell a Great Story

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The Number One Ingredient You Need to Tell a Great Story

When it comes to telling stories, there are a lot of people out there telling you all the rules you should and shouldn’t follow. They tell you not to use adverbs in prose and to avoid voice-overs in screenplays. They tell you the key to a great story is character, but then they tell you it’s plot. With every article you read you become more and more doubtful about what is right for your story, or if you’re even doing anything right at all.

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What Makes Playwriting Different Than Other Types of Writing

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What Makes Playwriting Different Than Other Types of Writing

When discussing playwriting, I often tend to characterize it as screenwriting's "down-to-earth older sister." The primary reason for this is the pure freedom of playwriting, something that at first left me feeling confused as a screenwriter when I took my first playwriting class. "What do you mean I can do whatever I want and that there are no rules?" I asked my professor.

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Why Game of Thrones Works for Television

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Why Game of Thrones Works for Television

With its sixth season coming to a climactic close, Game of Thrones remains one of the most popular series to date, especially given its large following both within the television world and the literary world. While other shows like Breaking Bad or Mad Men are equally as successful as well as creative, the fanbase in Game of Thrones is oftentimes unique to fantasy or science fiction genres because there is so much world to be discovered and learned about. This is also the case for the two other big fantasy series, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, which got me wondering if either series could be adapted for television.

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Do You Have a Main Character or Protagonist?

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Do You Have a Main Character or Protagonist?

Oftentimes, the titles main character and protagonist are easily confused - and for good reason. Usually, both the main character and the protagonist are the same character, so that when discussing stories, we tend to use the terms interchangeably, and correctly so. But sometimes, the main character and the protagonist are not the same person. When this happens, the lines become blurred and people begin to misuse both terms.

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How to Stay Healthy as a Writer Living a Sedentary Life

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How to Stay Healthy as a Writer Living a Sedentary Life

When I was in high school, I was an athlete. I don't mean that modestly either - tennis was my life. During the school year I trained everyday at a local tennis academy after school and played tournaments on the weekend. During the summer I bumped my two hour days to six and eight hour days to truly dedicate myself to becoming a higher ranked player. At this time in my life I could get home and drink chocolate milk and have three slices of pizza and chips and salsa and still lose weight - and no wonder why! I was often burning double if not triple daily my daily calorie intake everyday.

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How Video Games Can Help Your Storytelling

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How Video Games Can Help Your Storytelling

Video games get a bad rep. This is perhaps due in part because to some extent, video games can be really bad for people. There are games that are addictive and remove people from life and games that promote violence and sexist or racist stereotypes.

Yet these traits, especially the latter, are equally as prevalently in movies and books and yet no one seems to be a harbinger of justice for those mediums. And that is because as a culture, we can see how these mediums can also be very good for our culture, parodying what is wrong with it or creating characters who address our current state of the world.

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Magical Realism: What is it?

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Magical Realism: What is it?

Often considered to be originated in Latin America, magical realism is a genre many people have difficulties pinning down, especially because the degree to which some authors incorporate the genre in their work varies so much. Most people's first encounter with the genre is in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's, One Hundred Years of Solitude, though there are many more authors around the world who have embraced the style. Of course, like any genre, this one is not solely constrained to literature, though that is where it is the most prominent.

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Shakespeare's Sonnets: A Study in Character

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Shakespeare's Sonnets: A Study in Character

Despite the fact that poetry predates the novel - so far as the world knows - many people nowadays attribute poetry to decorative writing created for the sole purpose of being vague and incomprehensible. However, what critics of poetry tend to forget is that songwriting is a form of poetry, and so they are therefore not as unfamiliar with the form as they would like to think. Listen to any song today and you will most likely hear some sort of story, albeit a bad one maybe, but a story all the same.

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How to Create a Writer's Ritual

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How to Create a Writer's Ritual

Having devoted a large portion of my life to tennis, I am quite familiar with the idea of creating a ritual before a match or a serve to help me get into the mindset for the game, and as I began to become more dedicated to writing, I carried that practice over with me. One of the most difficult parts about writing that nobody mentions to you is pure mental perseverance.The truth is, sometimes we really aren't in the mood to write, and that's okay. There are days we feel uninspired or unworthy, and even the most seasoned writers face this challenge. But what matters is how we face that challenge, and what sets us apart is that we choose to overcome this challenge and choose to do so everyday. I have found the best way to do this is with a writer's ritual.

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