I pilfered this from somewhere on the web, but it was too good not to share.
You can click on the image to see it full-size.
10 Quick Tips About Adventure Stories
Ah, this is a fun topic – one of the five generated last week, as I was telling you.
Now “about adventure stories” is a bit vague – about reading or writing them?
And then, Adventure stories is a pretty wide field.
And who am I, anyway, to give anybody suggestions?
But ok, it’s part of the game, so here’s my ten point list of tips for adventure writers.
For what they are worth.
1 . Don’t be afraid
They will put you down, talk about escapism, implausibility, silliness, and generally try to put you in your place. Don’t be afraid to tell your story. Continue reading
More Italian Style
Talking about Italian style in imaginative fiction, last week I was part of a debate about what makes Italian genre fiction Italian.
Me and the other authors currently published by Acheron Books were asked to propose a four points guideline, a best practices hit list.
An interesting challenge.
Being the sort of contrary guy I am, I started by pointing out that I do not believe there’s a set of Italian guidelines that differ drastically from, say, Chinese guidelines, Indian guidelines or Canadian guidelines.
What the reader is ultimately interested in is a good story, and good stories do not follow provincial guidelines.
This said, where I to single out four points that, as an Italian, I strive to keep in mind when writing, well, here’s the list, somewhat expanded to explain each point as best as I can… Continue reading
That special place…
A short film about life, death and everything else.
It’s rated PG13, but it’s well worth a look.
Enjoy!
A week of (mostly) random generated posts
Three of the posts you have been reading on Karavansara this week were written based on titles generated by HubSpot‘s Blog Topic Generator.
The topic generator is a tool that… well, generates topics for blog posts.
Basically, you provide three keywords (nouns are better than phrases, or so does the documentation say) and at the push of a button the machine dreams up five topics for as many posts.
And you’re set for a full week.
And I thought, why not give it a try?
Might be fun, right?
So, here’s what I did. Continue reading
Writing Prompt – The Man and the Doll
More explorations of old photographs in search of characters.
This photo, taken in Les Alles, in Paris, early in the 20th century, is – to me at least – the sort of picture that holds within its frame a whole story.
We have just to find it and write it.
Wisecracking heroes and real life
Let’s have a good laugh, shall we?
Or, rather, let’s talk about laughing.
Yesterday I read a review of a book.
The reviewer was not very merciful in his analysis and basically he confirmed my starting opinion – that I better save my money.
But there was an observation, in that review, that struck a wrong note.
It is not believable that during a zombie pandemic people still feel like joking.
No, I said, this is wrong.
And I know it’s wrong because I grew up with stories filled with wisecracking heroes, of course.
But also because I read a fair selection of history books and memoirs.
And if there seem to be a constant in real life accounts of battles, natural disasters, assorted catastrophes and personal drama, is the fact that humor is a human traits that helps survival. Continue reading
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