Oh, we've seen him or her. Deadly cool hard-as-nails, unflappable. Juke boxes start when he hits them right, people back down when they see that fire in her eyes. Focused as a laser, immovable like the core of the world; James Bond, Batman, Shaft, Black Canary. The badasses.

We know them, of course. Now the problem is writing them.

Earlier, I addresses the heroic paradox of the violent hero, and noted a particularly egregious archetype I called the Unlikeable Heroic Badass (UHB) - the borderline sociopath that some authors assume people should ...

The five ways of creating a fantasy world

Create a good idea of your fantasy world
Naming characters, places, and religions.
Knowing when not to go too far
Remembering what you created
Creating a history of your world.
It would seem that writing fantasy would be easy, but yet there are an abundance of challenges that the writer must face. This article will give you a better grip on tackling the aspects of creating worlds, and the people who populate them.

CREATE A GOOD IDEA OF YOUR FANTASY WORLD

No world that is to sustain life exists without water, unless the people who inhabit it are completely bizarre in design. I’ve ...

During a discussion I recently had with a Tolkien fan, he informed me that we are all like Gollum, selfish and prone to evil. I think he missed Tolkiens message in LOTR. Certainly we are all tempted by evil, but the moment Tolkien introduced us to Samwise Gamgee ...

It's a nightmare.

Your world is forged and designed, documented and mapped. You have characters and histories and mysteries and ecologies. Everything's perfect, right? It's time to write, and . . .

. . . what are you going to write about? Wait a second, you've got a world, but where the heck's the story? It was there when you started this . . .

Or, you have your world, and you've written a story and . . . the well is dry. You know your world, but there aren't any tales to tell! What happened?

A strange paradox ...

A bit of news: Way With Worlds is being translated into German at Christian Spliess's Page. Go and check it out!

And now, on with our regular column:

Three figures lurked in a dark alcove in Castle Cragmore.

They fit together like an strange puzzle: one was burly human with shoulders like rocks. Another was a slender elf, his face and body ethereal and thin. The third was a black-bearded dwarf with a body that reminded one of a clenched fist.

"I find this quite disturbing," the human said elegantly. His accent was clipped and very prpper, with diction so sharp you could cut wood with it.
...