Category: Storytelling

Trilogies are Essential (and Not Just For Profit)

6/1/2026

by Gianna Vanore

Image via Tobias Rademacher on Unsplash

“Peeta, how come I never know when you’re having a nightmare?” I say.

“I don’t know. I don’t think I cry or thrash around or anything. I just come to, paralyzed with terror,” he says.

“You should wake me,” I say, thinking about how I can interrupt his sleep two or three times on a bad night. About how long it can take to calm me down.

“It’s not necessary. My nightmares are usually about losing you,” he says. “I’m okay once I realize you’re here.”

— Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire

This moment—one adored by millions of readers—in The Hunger Games trilogy is crucial, not only for the plot, but also for us to fall for Katniss and Peeta, to truly want them together. This moment is when we realized the extent of Peeta’s love for Katniss. This moment, a staple of this series, occurs in Catching Fire, the second book of The Hunger Games trilogy.

In Jordan Avery’s Op-Ed, “Trilogies Are Traps: Why Trilogies Are Bad For Storytelling,” she explains how trilogies have taken the literary market by storm, though she doesn’t see this as a good thing. Instead, she argues that the middle book (the “bridge” book, as she coins it) is unnecessary and stretches an otherwise good story too thin. She also claims that authors, instead of staying true to their craft, turn to the profit that comes from writing trilogies, even if it’s at the expense of their story.

Upon reading this, I felt a moral obligation to be the Trilogy Defender, as there are numerous trilogies other than just the mainstream ones that successfully tell their story and require a trilogy to do it well.

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Don’t Take Writing Advice

1/1/2026

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by Adam Buckley

Via Aaron Burden on Unsplash

The irony of this statement is not lost on me. By telling you not to take writing advice, I am, in fact, giving you writing advice—however!—if you follow me where I’m headed, you’ll see where I’m coming from. Age-old axioms like “show, don’t tell,” and “good characters have agency,” have kernels of truth to them; that’s why they’re so often repeated, but what comes after? How do writers really get better? My goal here isn’t to rebuke the institutions of writing criticism or education entirely, more so to make the case against generalized platitudes and advocate for contextual and self-motivated methods of improving one’s work.

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If You Want to Write, Watch as Well

5/1/2025

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by Ethan Gross

If you want to write, read a lot. It’s good advice, generally speaking, and very common. If you’ve ever taken a writing course or looked up writing advice online, you’ve almost certainly been given this tidbit. Most of my peers come from writing and literature backgrounds; they’re the kind of people who read all the time. Having come from a background studying film and TV, I had only read every so often, and even then it was usually for high school English class. As time went on, I focused more and more on creative writing, and I found myself being given this same piece of advice over and over again.

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Don't Stop Writing Fanfiction

12/1/2024

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by Bethaney Randazzo

“Stop writing fanfiction, and go get published.”

I often wonder where I would be if a twenty-three-year-old me had listened to that creative writing professor. Would I currently be in a masters in writing program, while teaching first-year college writing, on my way to transforming some of nearly eighty stories I’ve written over the decade since that comment was made into publishable works? Probably not.

via Canva

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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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Trilogies are Essential (and Not Just For Profit)

Don’t Take Writing Advice

If You Want to Write, Watch as Well

Don't Stop Writing Fanfiction

Who Can Write What?

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