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The “chicken vs egg” debate is one of the most controversial and grueling debates of our time, but the constant argument: education vs experience, is far more relevant.
Both educators and students have thought long and hard, objectively and subjectively on which of the two values is most important. The most popular arguments are often as follows: how can one know how to get the most out of the experience without education? How can one make anything out of their education without experience?
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Dear TYWI Summer Camp7/30/2021 I’m a Nonfiction camper and — starting only a month prior — blogger. Before all that, I’ve never experimented with writing much outside of school. I loved writing, but somehow the time to write what I deemed “writing” never came for me. Naively, I believed if I couldn’t write a novel, I wasn't a writer. But, three months and many prompts later, I found myself fortunately wrong. It’s the last week of TYWI’s Summer Camp, and It’s bittersweet.
There are plenty of how-to articles, books, and resources available for writers at every stage of the writing process — so many that it can seem overwhelming. One of the most common pieces of advice from any experienced writer is this: read, read, read. And that includes reading books on how to write.
While you can’t learn everything about writing from a book — especially since every writer is different with their own style that doesn’t always have to follow the rules — there are a few titles that will be helpful if you’re struggling to get that scene just right. After all that hard work, you’re finally finished with your manuscript. You send it off to the prospective publisher of your choosing with fingers crossed and butterflies in your stomach.
Days pass, soon turning into weeks or months, until that fateful email arrives in your inbox. You open it, ready for all your dreams to come true, only to come face to face with: “We’re sorry, but unfortunately…” Keeping Secrets From Your Reader7/26/2021 Recently, I came upon this opinion/rant post condemning authors that keep secrets from their readers for shock value and last-minute plot twists, and it got me thinking about what a reader should be allowed to know from the get-go. After looking into it, here are my two cents along with iconic examples.
I thought of Vicious by V. E. Schwab first — a book that makes readers wait for the root of the conflict, leaving them intrigued and flipping through pages. Then, Leigh Bardugo’s ever-famous Six of Crows, which withholds backstory until it becomes plot-relevant. Six of Crows also keeps itself engaging enough that most readers don’t even think about the backstories of the protagonists until they are told them and shocked by it. My further research came upon an author who also stated that “the reader knows what the POV character knows” and that “personally, I hate it when I read a novel and learn that the author has withheld essential information that the POV character knows.” The folklore Love Triangle7/25/2021 Part IV: cardigan 2
cardigan Picking up from last week’s article, this will be the final nail to Taylor Swift’s folklore love triangle, from the album of the year that just had its one-year anniversary a few days ago. The ending to cardigan, told from Betty’s perspective, contains some of folklore’s best lyrics and is filled with poetic pieces throughout Age Gaps in Fantasy7/25/2021 Trigger Warning for mentions of sexual assault and explanations of toxic relationships.
The undying question of undying characters — are fantasy age gaps okay? What makes some good, while others questionable? With fantasy being a genre often populated with a mix of mortal characters (the poor, lowly humans) and immortal ones (pretty much everything else you could think of) romantic pairings can get rather suspect. What to do when a vampire is in love with a mortal? What about fair folk falling in (eternal?) love with a human? Does it make a difference if they're a minor? If they've known each other for a long time? Exploring Podcast Writing7/22/2021 Podcasts are the most adaptive form of writing in the media. At least that’s how I see it. Lately, I’ve been looking much deeper into the commonality of podcasts in everyday media. This weird interest spike made me realize, podcasts are everywhere. Not only that- but because of their adaptive nature, there’s likely a podcast for anything you would want. In my last article, I recommended some True Crime podcasts and nonfiction in forms outside of novels such as documentaries and, well, podcasts. So today I’m focusing on the latter, the exploration of podcasts as a writer.
Writing Subplots7/21/2021 What is a Subplot?
As you’re writing your story, you may start to notice your plot going in a different direction than you originally planned. Typically, your story is never just about your protagonist taking on a horde of dragons, character A falling in love with character B, the chosen one saving the world, or any other epic journey you’ve conjured up. A subplot is, by definition, a “secondary strand of the plot that is a supporting side story for any story or the main plot” (Wikipedia). There are often multiple conflicts that your protagonist is trying to deal with. Maybe while the star football player is struggling to get into college, he’s also falling for someone on the team. The princess might be trapped in a tower, but she could also be trying to unravel a royal scheme. Most well-written and well-thought-out plots also come with amazing subplots to keep the story interesting and your readers engaged. It’s a pretty safe bet that when people read the comics section of the newspaper, they aren’t thinking about the theory behind the art form. They’re looking to see what whacky shenanigans Snoopy and the gang are getting into, and whether Garfield got his lasagna. But using those colorful boxes, artists can manipulate time and space on the page.
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