WARNING: Lots of spoilers in this one, especially if you're not up to date on Westworld. Words, like knives, grow dull with extended use. Language changes over time with the push and pull of invisible social forces--terms of art and technical jargon, once adopted into the zeitgeist, transforms like metamorphic rock. Think of the meme--once …
Finding Your Voice
Clichés are annoying and facile but they typically come into being for a reason. Something in them tends to be true or useful. Of all the clichés in genre writing I hold the least bearable, the realization that a character "had the power inside themselves all along" is one of the most nauseating. For writers, …
Flatness and Feeling: Three Recent Works
Note: The following post contains minor spoilers for the plots of All Systems Red, Ancillary Justice, and Blade Runner 2049. Probably the major theme of recent science fiction has been the way technology distances us from our own emotions. One of the devices authors and directors use to explore this distancing effect is intentionally flattening …
From Twee to Grime: Tone Gone Bad
Tone is the psychological setting of your story. It establishes the ethos of your world, that is to say the prevailing philosophy. It is one of the key elements in giving weight and gravity to your story. It's also very easy to get wrong. Wild tone shifts are a problem, of course, though if handled …
DAVID WELLINGTON 
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