Hollingsworth

One of the things we love about the Fantasy genre is all the great creatures! J.R.R Tolkien once said: "...If it does not have dragons, it's not a tale worth telling." Okay, maybe that's a little far, but you get the point, yeah?  We all have our favorite mythic monsters: dragons, griffins, centaurs, trolls, three-headed dogs, etc. But all too often I find myself beginning to get a little worn out on the same monsters. There are too many people who don't do them right, or rely on the common conception of said monster. Here a few tips on how to nail your mythic monsters:   First Off: New Monsters : Your fantastic realm can be huge, so why constrict it to just dragons, centaurs and the like?   Consider… The Manticore : Head of a lion, face of a man. Sometimes seen with a scorpion's tail, but this is not a necessary characteristic of the Manticore. Originated in Persian mythology. Sometimes we see them on a coat of arms. They can speak and shoot

T here are A LOT of posts, tips, etc. out there about character development. You need to know such in such about your character, you need to know their quirks, you need to know their backstories, so on and so forth. So why do we STILL get dry characters? It's probably because we aren't getting far enough inside the characters' head. Photo by  Eutah Mizushima  on  Unsplash Obviously it's important to know what your character looks like, what their name is, their backstory. That's o.k. This is your foundation, right? How else would we form characters in the first place? However, this is not enough. We need to dig deeper, and that is where it gets gritty. So consider... We need the characters to be real. This means more than just their height, weight, quirks, personality and muscle structure. We have to go much deeper than that, I'm afraid. What are their motivations? WHY do they do what they do? What are their beliefs? What are they afraid

A writer's worst fear: the infamous WRITER'S BLOCK . (duh duh duuuuuh). How do we get out of it? Is there a cure? We've all had those times when we want to write but we just can't. We sit down at our desk and stare at a blank sheet of paper until frustration builds up in our little writer souls and we just want to start screaming or shoot something...or go reclaim our stolen treasure from a giant evil dragon who evicted us from our own houses. (To each their own, right?) I'm going to be honest, sometimes there is not much you can do. Sometimes you just have to wait it out, and this doesn't mean you're a bad writer. It just means that maybe you've exhausted your Creative. Here are 10 Things you can try to get your Creative back: Take a step back: Sometimes, we get so immersed in our stories that it starts to take over and stifle us. In the same way that we occasionally need to step away from stressful situations in order to move ahead, we a