writing Archives - Andrew Knighton Writes

When the Antagonist Isn’t the Villain

Moody black and white photograph of a smartly dressed man smoking and holding a gun. — Image by Sam Williams from Pixabay

A lot of the time, when we talk about stories, we use the terms “villain” and “antagonist” interchangeably. But while they’re often embodied in the same character, they’re not the same thing, and lumping them together doesn’t just have an aesthetic impact on the story, it also has an impact on how we view the world.

Antagonist Vs Villain

What is an antagonist and what is a villain?

Simply put, a villain is a morally bad person, while an antagonist is someone who stands in opposition to the protagonist.

The villain’s moral harm doesn’t need to be huge. It could be as small as selfishly trying to trick the romantic lead out of a healthy relationship, or as vast as trying to wipe out half the life in the universe. But by the moral standards of the story, and its implied perspective, that character is in the wrong.

An antagonist doesn’t have to be this. A well-intentioned character can stand in a protagonist’s way because their aims don’t match, they have different information, or someone’s been tricked. People can disagree without one of them being in the wrong.

Or can they?

Before we get into that question, I want to point out one more thing about this distinction. Being an antagonist means fulfilling a specific role within the mechanics of the story, obstructing the protagonist’s desires and creating tension. Being a villain doesn’t necessarily mean that. It’s a feature of the character, probably an important one, but it’s one they can have while filling all kinds of different roles in the story machine, from background colour to ally to, yes, antagonist.

You could think of villainy as an aesthetic, from a storytelling point of view (not a real world one! I’m not that guy), but as mechanically neutral. Antagonism, on the other hand, is aesthetically neutral—any style of character could be an antagonist—but has a mechanic.

Now, back to that question of disagreement…

Why Are Antagonists Often Villains?

Why bundle these concepts together?

Because protagonists are usually in the right, morally, and that works well when their opponents are in the wrong. This makes the protagonist more sympathetic, the conflict more satisfying, and the story’s moral outcome clearer. The good person was opposed by the bad person and the bad person lost. Order is restored. Reader is happy.

This is how things work in every single ghostwritten novel I’ve worked on. Those books aren’t meant to be challenging, so they use a familiar, comfortable dynamic. Readers follow and empathise with the protagonist, so that’s the hero. They want to see the hero focused on their conflict with the villain, so the villain is the antagonist. And of course, they want to see good beat evil, so this all fits nicely together.

It’s satisfying.

Separating Antagonists and Villains

But the two don’t have to line up.

My new novella, Ashes of the Ancestors, features several characters who could be labelled as villains. The warlord Lorkas robs a temple and threatens its innocent priests. The ghost of his former opponent, Eras, prizes old feuds over the good of society. They are both, to borrow a technical term from moral philosophy, murderous arseholes. But while they are the antagonists of certain scenes, neither is the antagonist of the book.

The antagonist of the book is Adrana, a newly arrived priest who wants to smash the Eternal Abbey in order to destroy Eras. That wish puts her in opposition to the protagonist, Magdalisa, who wants to look after her people as best she can—people who rely on the abbey and its ghosts for guidance. Throughout the story, the two are in conflict over this, even as they work together. That conflict creates tension and expresses the central question of the book—how do you relate to tradition and the past?

Adrana isn’t a villain. Her “aesthetic” isn’t one of moral wrong. She and Magdalisa are both sympathetic in their own ways, both right about certain things, and there’s value in what both of them believe. But they’re opposed to each other, and the resolution of the story, the place where the satisfaction kicks in, comes from resolving that tension, not beating the villains.

So far, so good. Villains and antagonists don’t have to be the same thing. But why does that matter?

Accepting Opposition

Stories express and shape how we see the world.

If all of our stories tell us that the people we disagree with—our antagonists—are also morally wrong—villains—then we’ll see the world that way. We’ll find it hard to accept that the person on the other side of a disagreement could be wrong. That’s problematic, to say the least, because none of us are right all the time, and sometimes it’s important to shift with what others say.

Stories where the antagonists are villains teach us the importance of struggling for what’s right, and that’s a good thing to learn.

Stories where the antagonists aren’t villains teach us that not everyone we struggle against is in the wrong, and that’s also a good thing to learn.

Especially right now, when there’s a lot of talk of polarisation within society, it’s important to recognise these two separate lessons, not to run our brains along the same tracks over and over again until we see every person with a different viewpoint as one who is wrong and must be opposed. We need varied stories to help us with that.

Mixing up the relationship between villains and antagonists isn’t just aesthetically satisfying. It’s also morally important.

Trust me, I’m the protagonist here.

If you’ve got thoughts on this, or you’ve got you own experiences of writing villains and antagonists to share, then why not find me on Mastodon or Twitter and tell me about them.

And if what you’ve read above has got you intrigued, or you want to help a poor struggling author so he can break out of ghostwriting and focus on more nuanced books, then you can buy Ashes of the Ancestors here:

Luna Press for physical books

Kobo ebook

Amazon ebook

Ashes of the Ancestors: How I Almost Wrote Too Much Story

The cover of the novella Ashes of the Ancestors

Ashes of the Ancestors had a slightly unusual beginning, and a writing process that didn’t go the way it normally does.

Back in June 2021, I submitted a novel to Luna Press. In her rejection email, Francesca said that there was a lot to like about it, but that it wouldn’t fit with Luna’s novel line. She asked if I’d be able to trim it down to novella length, for a submission window coming up in 2022.

It’s great when editors and publishers give you an encouraging sort of rejection, and I like to seize those opportunities. After all, when someone asks to see a revised version of a story, you know that they’re interested in something about it. But that novel was too unwieldy to trim down below 40,000 words, so instead I decided to treat this encouragement as motivation to write something new. An editor liked how I wrote a story, so I’d write something specifically for her call.

I went diving into my big Evernote file of writing ideas, a rich mulch of snippets and concepts that’s been slowly composting into inspiration for years, and pulled out the idea of writing something about history and tradition, themes close to my heart. Of course, I needed something more concrete to hang the story on, but there was also a note about a monastery full of ghosts. Nothing speaks to the past like ghosts, so it seemed a perfect fit.

I tend to go heavy on my planning when I write. I find that stories flow best for me if I’ve got a sturdy structure to work with. Sometimes that planning gets very intricate, as I weave in all the ideas that have been floating around over years of considering a story.

For Ashes, I started with the characters. Having different characters to represent different approaches to history and tradition seemed a good way of expressing my theme. The different approaches could directly conflict through those characters. So I created a bunch of characters with different history-related agendas, from casting off the past to wallowing in it. Then I worked out what plots would arise from their interactions, mapped out the highs and lows of those plotlines, and spaced those beats out into a sensible number of chapters for a novella of up to 40,000 words. So far, so good.

Normally, my next step would be to write the whole story, but this time I hit a snag. It very quickly became clear that I wasn’t used to novella length stories. I had too much going on, and within a couple of thousand words, I could see that it wouldn’t fit.

I went back and worked out which characters, with their own plot arcs and story strands, I could lose while still keeping the core of the story. That hurt. I was pleased with my outline and proud of how clever I’d been in making these lovely symbolic characters. But I forced myself to ditch or combine a bunch of them and rewrite the outline around their absence.

This time it worked. Based on that outline, I hammered through the first draft of Ashes of the Ancestors in less than a month.

By the end of that, I already had some ideas of things I could do better, what I wanted to emphasise or add more of. So I went back through for an edit, tidying up prose and reinforcing characters, then sent it out to some lovely beta readers, all of whom had previously given me useful feedback on my work.

The beta readers came back to me with comments on the book’s strengths and weaknesses, and some general ideas for changes to make it stronger, most of which I used and a few of which I decided didn’t fit what I was after. Other people can give you a more objective perspective on your work, but that doesn’t mean that everything they suggest will fit your aims. This isn’t improv, and knowing when to say no is as important as mostly saying yes. Before editing, I compiled the comments from different readers together, grouping them by chapter where relevant, or by some other connecting thread, for example stylistic stuff or comments on a particular character. That meant that I could compare comments, see the recurring themes, and not end up revising the same thing multiple times.

After I’d done those edits, I read the book once more to look for any mistakes I’d added during the editing, before setting it aside. It waited on my hard drive until Luna Press opened their submission window for novellas, and then it was out of my hands.

Writing this book was immensely satisfying. I learned some valuable things about my craft, including what’s too much plot for a novella. And I’ve produced something good enough to get published.

Here’s hoping I can pull that trick off again.

If you’ve gotten something from this, or you’ve got you own experiences of the writing process to share, then why not find me on Mastodon or Twitter and tell me about them.

And if what you’ve read so far has got you intrigued, you can buy Ashes of the Ancestors here:

Luna Press for physical books

Kobo ebook

Amazon ebook

Writing About Writing

Author wielding a pile of his books and grinning.

It’s a busy week by my standards, as two articles about my work have sprung up in the past few days.

First, there’s an interview about my upcoming novella Ashes of the Ancestors over at the Scifi and Fantasy Network. I had a fun time talking about writing life, history, & the literary importance of Winnie the Pooh.

Second, I’ve written an article about ghostwriting for Canadian genre magazine On Spec. This is the article that my previous Q&A was leading to, and provides a more detailed and coherent dive into what it means to be a ghostwriter in the modern market. It covers the nature of the work and how to get into it, so if that’s something you’re curious about, then check it out.

And if, after all of that, you’d like to see more from me, Ashes of the Ancestors is out in just a few weeks. It’s a fantasy story about memory, empire, and grappling with the past, and you can find links to preorder it over here.

How I Write a Commando Comic

My latest issue of Commando is out today, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to write about how I create a script. Buckle in, this is going to be one of my longer posts…

Inspiration

Desert Vultures cover art by Neil Roberts

My inspiration for Commando comics can come from a bunch of different places. TV shows, larp events, conversations on Twitter, things I studied at university, these have all fed into issues. Most come from plugging together more than one source.

The immediate inspiration for Desert Vultures was the 80^th anniversary of Operation Compass, the first big Allied push of the Western Desert Campaign. Anniversaries are handy things for Commando, as they’re a good way to hook people into an issue. Sometimes my editor at Commando will send me a list of anniversaries they’d like to cover, and I pitch to those. Sometimes I spot an opportunity and suggest it myself.

My biggest source of inspiration, as I recently discussed in a video interview, is history books. I read a lot of them, sometimes for pleasure, sometimes for other writing projects. Back when I was writing for War History Online, I read a lot about the Second World War, which meant that I already had ideas for how to look at the Western Desert campaign.

When looking for a Commando story, I’m often looking for a conflict between people on the same side, not just a fight against the enemy. In-group conflicts often lead to more interesting stories, as characters argue and compete with each other – think about all the twists and tensions in Game of Thrones. I also like to cover the international nature of the Allied war effort. Fortunately, bringing people from different backgrounds together often causes conflict, so that became the hook for Desert Vultures – French and British officers forced to work together despite their differences, one of them rigidly rule-bound, the other relaxed and improvisational. Could they achieve a shared goal?

Pitching

Once I’ve got my inspiration, I write a pitch. This sets out the story in two ways – first as a three-sentence synopsis, giving the setting, the main character, and the hook for their story. Then a page-by-page breakdown of what will happen.

When I’m writing the pitch, my thinking is shaped by two things – the characters and the plot. As Robert McKee points out in his excellent book Story, these two aren’t separate, but it can still be useful to talk about them that way.

The character is the core of a Commando story. Readers have to care about the people they’re spending time with. That means making someone who’s interesting to Commando readers, and who will drive the story forward. There are dozens of different ways to achieve this, and I always consider the balance of competence, proactivity, and likability, as recommended by the team at Writing Excuses. Most importantly, the protagonist has to want something, to keep them motivated.

The nature of Commando does a lot to define the comic’s protagonists. They have to be involved in military activity, usually during the world wars. They need to have a mission or objective, something that propels the story forward, whether it’s saving lives, sinking a submarine, or perhaps escaping occupied territory. For Desert Vultures, it’s a specific military mission – finding and destroying a hidden Italian base.

The story is then driven by this mission. What does the protagonist have to do to achieve their objective? Who stands in the way? What setbacks do they face? I structure the broad strokes of the story around this, then flesh it out with cool details, often found in those books I mentioned. Give the plot a few twists, and I’ve soon got 63 bullet points, one for every page.

I send my pitch to my editor at Commando, then wait. After an editorial meeting, they come back to me with one of three responses:

Yes, write it! My favourite response, for obvious reasons.
No, this isn’t suitable. This one doesn’t happen often, as I have a good idea of what Commando are after, but just occasionally an idea isn’t right for them, or has already been used.
Yes, but… The most common response. I’ve got a good idea, but it needs refinement. This might lead to a revised pitch, or just to me making some changes as I write the script.

Writing

Once the pitch has been approved and the outline adjusted, it’s time to write. My deadline is usually two or three months ahead, but I seldom wait that long, as I love writing comic scripts. As a fulltime freelance writer, I have the flexibility to make space in my schedule, but other projects sometimes have first dibs, especially if they’re on a deadline or offering a big payment. Within a few weeks of approval, I set aside some days when my focus will be on writing my script.

Having a detailed outline makes the writing relatively quick. I don’t have to think about the broad strokes of what’s on each page, just the details. How many pictures will there be? How will one lead to another, telling a clear and coherent story? What will everyone say?

For the flow of the images, a lot of my inspiration and guidance comes from comics guru Scott McCloud. His writing on comics is phenomenal and taught me about such critical topics as transitions. A comic isn’t just a bunch of pictures, it’s what’s implied by the way you move from one to the next, and thinking about that adds a lot of complexity.

I’ve recently changed my approached to scripting. At the time I wrote Desert Vultures, I wrote everything for one page, then moved on to the next, and so on, writing the descriptions and dialogue together. I’ve recently changed to writing all the descriptions first, then going back to the start and adding the dialogue. I find that works better for getting character voices right.

I’m no artist, but I do occasionally draw at the writing stage, to help me plan out the action. The things I draw are normally seen only by me and my waste paper bin, because I’m a terrible artist. But drawing can help me work out the flow of the panels, breaking a page down into a series of distinct images, each one with its own unique elements that together tell a story. Many stick men have died brutal deaths on scrap paper battlefields to improve my Commando scripts.

Writing dialogue is a funny thing. It’s never about being realistic, but it is about sounding realistic. In real life, people um and ah, they let sentences trail off and leave things half-said. They don’t deliver snappy dialogue while they’re busy fighting for their lives. But a story requires dialogue that flows while creating the illusion of people really talking. In the case of a comic like Commando, it means dreaming up things people could say while bullets whip past their heads or they punch each other in the face. It’s a fun challenge to create that sort of dialogue without it coming out stilted.

Creating distinct voices is important too. I’m the first to admit that I don’t always manage this, but if a character’s verbal ticks and preoccupations stand out, that makes them seem more real.

But the most important thing about writing isn’t any of these technical details. It’s sitting your arse down in the chair and having the discipline to keep going, even when you’re bored or distracted. Discipline, more than anything else, is how I get a script done.

Editing

Before I send a script off, I read it over a couple more times and make edits. This is usually just proofreading, as I’ve done my story edits at the pitching stage. Sometimes it’s adding more detail to the action of an image or sharpening up a piece of dialogue. Mostly, it’s finding my typos and grammatical errors.

If I have time, I leave a day or two between writing and editing. That way I can look at the script with fresh eyes. But the brutal truth is, often I need to be moving on to my next project. Then the script just gets left until after lunch, then given that polish and sent on its way.

Out of My Hands

From that point on, my work is done. The script vanishes into the ether for months on end, only to re-emerge some time later as a fully formed comic. To me, it’s magic, but this is where the hard work happens. I could never create the amazing images that Commando’s artists come up with. You’d have to ask one of them if you want to know how that part works.

Sometimes I’ll see the cover or snippets of art as Commando HQ build buzz for a release, but I don’t see the interiors until the issue comes out. This is also the point at which I get to read editorial changes to the story – how the team at Commando have sharpened up my dialogue, expanded on descriptive panels, or adjusted the plot beats to make the story even more exciting. The thrill of seeing a new Commando is as real for me the writer as for anyone reading it.

With a script finished, it’s time to go back to the beginning. Seek inspiration. Invent a character. Craft a pitch. Sit my arse down in my chair and start work on the next issue.

The circle of writing starts again.

Building a Better Fantasy City with Ex Novo

I’ve enthused before about the joys of world-building games like Microscope and Watching the World Die. I love the way that random chance and the structure of a rule set can lead to rich, surprising places that feel organic, coherent, and interesting.

I recently needed to develop the setting for a new story, and as it was set in a city I decided to try out a game designed for this very purpose – Ex Novo by Martin Nerurkar and Konstantinos Dimopoulos.

Ex Novo is simple to play and takes only a few hours. Most importantly given recent circumstances, you can play it solo. I was creating my city during lockdown, and while my cat does like to play with dice, he’s not so great at urban planning.

Play turned out to be pretty simple. You decide a few basic parameters, including the size and age of your settlement. Then you roll dice and check a couple of tables to determine the terrain it’s founded in and why it’s there. After that, you play a series of rounds in which you roll more dice, look up the results on tables, and add features to the map depending upon those results.

Those randomised additions might sound like a recipe for something disjointed, but that’s not how the game works. Every random choice is both specific and open to interpretation, accompanied by questions that invite you to flesh out the details. Role 325 and you’re adding a new trade route, represented by a resource on the map, but what the resource is, where it goes, who it’s traded with and how, these are all open to interpretation. Just adding that resource to the map creates a relationship between it and other parts of the city, which encourages answers that built on what came before.

It helps that the example game plays a little loose with the rules, in the interests of a better narrative. This encourages flexibility, adding extra details while benefiting from the structure the rules bring.

I’d expected this game to just create a map, but it’s more than that. It creates a history for the city, a history tied to that map. It also creates political factions and develops the conflicts between them, showing the politics and society of your city. As a writer building a setting, that’s incredibly useful for me. It means that my characters have a past to talk about and other people to interact with, enriching my writing.

But the map, that’s the most useful thing. I don’t normally bother with a map while writing. I might sketch out where named places are compared with each other, for the sake of consistency. But this game has given me districts, public buildings, surrounding terrain, roads, walls, and ruins. Any time my characters travel from place to place, I can look at that map and get instant, surprising inspiration about what they’ll see.

This sort of game isn’t going to be for everyone, but if you like making up stories and imagining places then it can be a great tool, and with the designers currently letting you name your own price, Ex Novo is a bargain.

Making Stories from the Past

How do we turn the past into stories?

It might sound like a simple question, but the relationship between stories and real events is complex and messy.

The Nature of History

Last week, I received editorial comments on a history article I’m writing. High on the to-do list was making the article into more of a story. As soon as I read that, I knew what they meant, and I knew that they were right. I also knew why I hadn’t done it the first time around.

The past isn’t a neat narrative. It’s a jumple of people, places, and events. At one time these were facts, and what we’re left with is the evidence of what those facts might have been. It’s jumbled and disjointed, but also complex and confusing. Nothing about it is simple. Nothing happens for one reason.

One step removed from the past lies history. This is an attempt to establish facts from the evidence, to put those facts in order, and to squeeze meaning from them. It narrows the focus of what we’re looking at, asserts cause and effect, and prioritises some patterns over others. To do this, it draws boundaries about what’s included in any particular account of history, from the infinite variety of options available.

And then there are stories set in the past, whether told as fiction or non-fiction. These narrow the focus further, to individual people and what happened to them. It turns patterns into narratives, the mechanical procession of events into human experiences. It simplifies some things and exaggerates others so that they come to life for us.

In writing my article, I’d taken the jumble of facts and turned them into history, but I’d missed the next step. I had something that showed patterns in the past, but that didn’t engage well with our humanity.

Framing the Narrative

Whether you’re writing history or a story, there’s also another element to how this works, and that’s framing.

Take the First World War. It’s a messy business. It began and ended at different times in different parts of the world. It was fought in different ways on different fronts, in land and sea and air, was tangled in with events on the home front, and its effects linger with us a century on. Parts of France and Belgium are still inaccessible due to munitions from that war.

Last month, I saw Field Music perform their album Making a New World. Composed for the centenary of the armistice, it’s all about the knock-on effects of that war, from tanks to plastic surgery to sanitary towels. The album tells the story of the First World War not as a self-contained event from 1914 to 1918 but as the epicentre from which vast tremors of change erupted.

My upcoming Commando comic Out of the Woods tells the First World War from a very different perspective. To look at the introduction of chemical weapons, it follows two fictional Canadians from before they signed up through to the aftermath of the Second Battle of Ypres. There are many other ways I could have told that story – from the point of view of the Germans, of civilians, of communities affected for generations by the chemicals. I could have followed a medic, a general, even a gas cannister or a patch of ground. I chose the perspective that suited my purposes, but whichever one I chose, I would have had to cut down and rearrange the history, which itself cuts down and rearranges the facts, in each case forming a different pattern.

Telling Your Story from History

So remember, when telling a story from history, you’re never going to fit in all the facts. You’re already missing some of them and you don’t need them all for your goal. Explore the different ways you could look at the topic, pick a story that will bring the past to life in an engaging way, and let the rest fall by the wayside. You’re not here to tell history. You’re here to tell one story against its background.

***

What if someone had conquered the Vikings, someone claiming to be their gods?

What if King Arthur’s knights met a very different metal-clad warrior?

What if you were ordered to execute a statue, and hanging just didn’t seem to work?

These short stories explore different aspects of history, some of them grounded in reality, some alternative takes on the past as we know it. Stories of daring and defiance; of love and of loss; of noble lords and exasperated peasants.

From a Foreign Shore is available now in all ebook formats.

Putting Real People Into Unreal Stories

I’ve been making my friends fight each other.

It’s OK though, it’s not as bad as it sounds.

I quite often pick the names of characters based on people I know. The names have to come from somewhere, and scanning my social media feeds is a good way to get them quickly. Usually, I mix and match first names and surnames, rather than use one person’s full name.

Recently, I’ve taken a different approach. I put up a message on Facebook asking my friends if any of them would like characters named after them in my Commando comics. I got a lot of positive responses and started using those people in my story pitches. Some became protagonists, others villains, and many got bit parts in the stories I was developing.

This was all fine and theoretical while I was writing pitches, but now Commando have commissioned some of those stories, so I’m writing the scripts. When characters have the names of people I know, it’s hard not to picture them as those people, even if they’re very different in character. In my head, I’m making people I know fight, chase, and argue with each other.

It’s a little weird for me. I imagine it’ll be even more so for my friends when these stories are published.

Sometimes, this can work out really nicely. Years ago, I wrote a flash story featuring a character named Mantaj, after one of my friends. She never saw characters with her name in stories, and so was delighted with it. That made my day.

A lot of people get excited at having characters named after them, and as a writer that gives me an extra bit of fun. Still, it’s never going to stop being weird when I make them fight each other.

Deciding What History To Write

I’ve been writing a lot of historical fiction lately, both on this blog and for Commando Comics. I’ve also been writing articles for places like History.com. That raises an interesting question – how to decide what to write.

For me, there are several factors.

One is what I know about. With a few exceptions, I focus on topics I have plenty of sources for or already know a lot about. This narrows the field and helps avoid misrepresenting history I don’t understand.

Then there’s what’s interesting – both what I’m excited about and what I think other people will be intrigued by. That means finding novelty in the subject matter. For fiction, it also means finding an engaging character.

The audience I’m writing for comes into it. Commando readers mostly want stories about 20th-century warfare, especially World War Two, and they want them action-packed. While I try to make my Commando stories more diverse and varied than they’ve traditionally been, that has to come within the limits of what their readers will go for.

The format matters. What makes an interesting article is very different from what makes a visually exciting comic story, and both are very different from prose fiction, where you get inside a character’s head.

Then there’s the desire for variety. Editors want stories that haven’t been told, and I want to help show diverse stories and perspectives. That means I’ll sometimes pick a piece of history I don’t know quite so well because I think it should be seen.

Picking what history to write about is never as simple as just picking up a book and going with that. It’s a big challenge even before I set my fingers to the keyboard.

And that makes it part of the fun.

***

What if someone had conquered the Vikings, someone claiming to be their gods?

What if King Arthur’s knights met a very different metal-clad warrior?

What if you were ordered to execute a statue, and hanging just didn’t seem to work?

From a Foreign Shore is available now in all ebook formats.

Live Fast and Leave a Beautiful Story

There’s something of futility in a writer’s work.

We’re always trying to capture a moment, real or imagined, to pin it permanently into place.

But nothing lasts. Your favourite blogging site might close down. Your book might go out of print. Google could refuse access to the ideas you’ve set down in a document because they claim it breaches their terms. And in the end, the terms of all our lives are impermanent. The words we set down will turn to dust, like all of us.

That’s not an argument against trying. Taking those words to a new site, saving your notes where Google can’t steal them, laying down a novel that gives joy long after you’re gone, these are all ways of asserting our own existence, of forcing meaning on the universe, of making ourselves just a little bigger and the world just a little better. You can’t escape death, but everything else is up for grabs.

Stories told around a campfire are as valid as those etched in marble a hundred feet high. It doesn’t have to be permanent to matter, because nothing is forever.

Live fast and leave a beautiful story.

Blogger’s Block

Sometimes you just need to start writing. It’s a thing I’m realising more and more, as I try to find ways past writer’s block, or past just not wanting to do my work. You put down words, and they might not be the best words, but at least they get the ideas flowing out of your bain.

Picture by Jose Mª Izquierdo Galiot via Flickr creative commons

Like today, I couldn’t decide what to blog about. Tor.com had a piece on characters who we love because of how damaged they are, so maybe I could reflect on that. Or there was the larp I ran recently, I could talk about its story or my involvement in it. There’s the incident last night where I spent half an hour chasing down a mouse in my study, because this is what happens when you have a cat. Honestly, the possibilities are endless.

And that’s the problem. When the possibilities are endless, how do you work out which one is good? Which one is relevant to my readers, and might grab attention in search engines, and will be satisfying to write? Because when your blog is part personal venting and part marketing tool, all of those things are relevant.

In the end, I’ve taken a copout path by going meta and writing about how tricky it is to write. Instead of deciding what to discuss, I’m discussing how difficult that decision is. Problem solved.

I mean, not really solved. I’ll be back to it next week. This is a regular blog writing problem.

Everyone gets stuck from time to time, staring at the screen and not knowing what to write. And sometimes the answer is just whatever comes into your head.