Category: Characters

What's in a Name?

8/1/2025

by Alexa Diamant

via flickr by Steve Jurvetson

The enemies have taken over the ship! Quick, Captain, we must board our escape pods and find life somewhere else. But before we go, you’ll need to verify your identity to access the pods. What do you mean you don’t know? What’s that you say—the author changed it again? Damn those writers and their incessant need to constantly change our names!

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Trilogies are Traps: Why Trilogies are Bad For Storytelling

6/1/2025

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by Jordan Avery

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

They’re everywhere: bookshelves, libraries, Target. Everywhere I look I find three neat novels placed one after the other on the shelf. Trilogies have taken the publishing industry by storm—and not in a good way. Although trilogies can be appealing to the commercial audience, they usually do more harm than good when it comes to storytelling. Sometimes stretching a story across three books can be the downfall of a great story.

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Who Can Write What?

8/1/2024

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by Eric Noon

Image by nugroho dwi hartawan from Pixabay

One of the most common sayings for writers is to “write what you know.” Pulling from your own experiences and the things that you’re already familiar with are great ways to get the juices flowing and to fill in the gaps of otherwise tiresome or troubling writing in which we writers can often get bogged down. After all, it’s much easier to put a twist on a story you already know, or embellish something that’s happened to you--the bulk of the work is already done! The real question, and maybe where the advice needs to shift, is “what can we learn from the things we don’t already know?”

If all we’re to write about is our own experiences, then what room does that leave for us to learn, to empathize with, and to appreciate the stories of others? Writing about what we don’t know, the experiences we personally will never have to go through, could potentially help us to connect and build bridges with one another in ways we couldn’t see before. But as with any work of art, the court of public opinion holds a lot of sway in what is acceptable and what is not. I’m often left with the burning question of “Who can write what?

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Queerbaiting: Victim or Villain?

6/1/2024

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by Emily Langford

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

As a queer, “elder millennial” who watched as personal computers suddenly took root in our homes, I experienced the rise of online fandom firsthand. Prior to the internet, my experience with fandom was a solo one, I didn’t know anyone who had the same obsessive passion for stories and characters like I had. I was the annoying kid who would, unprompted, spew out tidbits and theories about books and movies, the weirdo who was off in her own little world where all her characters existed at my day-dreamy little whims. I was tolerated at best and I eventually learned to keep my fervor to myself. I remember the first time I entered the titles of my favorite obsessions into the search bar. Suddenly, I was very much not alone. Each of my hyperfixations had a dedicated chat room or message board with other people who understood, who shared my passions. I finally found a place of acceptance.

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I Saw A Black Man Holding A Gun: An Evaluation Of Black People In Writing

2/1/2024

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by Qwayonna Josephs

At nine years old, I participated in my school’s reading program. We’d get a medal for every hundred books we’d read. Being the overachiever I still am, I read everything in sight, trying to be the student wearing the most medals. This program introduced me to The Bluford Series, which consists of many black-led stories. My school had the entire collection available in the reading section of my third-grade class. All the books I read from the series had the same elements, single mothers, troubled teens, violence, incarceration, and Ebonics.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Looking back now, it’s crazy to think that my introduction to Black-led stories was a book with a Black man on the cover, holding a gun, a book that was distributed to schools from Scholastic and praised as honest portrayals of inner city kids. Yet, every one of those books I read came from the mind of Paul Langan, a white man who claims in an interview that his intention behind the idea was sparked by minority students wanting to see themselves in print. I’m sure that drew lots of students to the books, seeing someone who looked like them on the cover―it definitely drew me in―but, with maturity and clarity, I now understand the harmfulness of these stories and characters. While trying to show our “experiences,” the books highlight negative stereotypes, slap on a problematic cover, and end up in the hands of impressionable elementary, middle, and high school kids that are desperate to see themselves in a story.

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What's in a Name?

Trilogies are Traps: Why Trilogies are Bad For Storytelling

Who Can Write What?

Queerbaiting: Victim or Villain?

I Saw A Black Man Holding A Gun: An Evaluation Of Black People In Writing

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