wiki.secretGeek
Category fiction
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Book Club
Here's the list of books from my bookclub. If you're interested in joining, please be aware that membership is highly restricted, and you must be either a brother of mine, or a brother of a brother of mine. Rules are that the books must be critically acclaimed Sci-Fi, from rece…
Characters in Fiction
Writing a book and struggling to make either a good book or powerful characters? I have original and useful ideas. Possibly wrong, but definitely helpful. What are characters for? In the book "How to Write a Damn Good Novel", James Frey says: Characters are to a novelist what…
Dialogue in fiction
Dialogue is a conversation between two people. Jill: How are you Jack? Jack: I'm good, Jill and you? Jill: Not good Jack. Not good at all. Dialogue in fiction should be *indirect.* Dialogue often has to do two or three things at once. - It may have to reveal facts. (This is …
Joke Genious
The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. —Famous Smart Alec, Samuel Clemens Explaining a joke can only ever make it funnier Analyzing a joke is like dissecting a frog, in the end they both die. —Woody Allen I used to believe that jokes stopped being funny when …
Missing Mothers
A moment of silence for all of the fictional mothers that had to die in the name of tragic back story and character development. — @ *Snape* on Mother's Day 2015 This is something my kids have noticed. It seems like every movie we show them: the mother is dead, sick or missing. …
Red String
What is the connection between these three things? - A Chinese legend of an invisible cord tied around the ankle that connects those who are destined to meet. - Kabbalist belief that a thin scrap of woolen thread can be worn to ward off misfortune brought about by the evil eye. -…
Story Layers
I've worked out a proper grand unified theory of story telling, and it's much simpler than all the old theories. The Search for the Grand Unified Theory of Story Telling Some people analyze stories and say things like: There's a plot, and there's a story. The plot is just what…
The 32 People You Meet In Heaven, Hell and Everywhere Else
Consider the The Big Five Personality Traits, i.e. - Openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious) - Conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. easy-going/careless) - Extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved) - Agreeableness (friendly/compassion…
The Action Hero Theory
There are two kinds of male action heroes -- the tough guy and the pretty boy. The key to the tough guy is not what he does to other people but what other people do to him. In particular: he can take a punch. The defining feature of action hero stories is that the hero *does* …
The enchanted loom
Every thread of history reveals another layer of the tapestry of our existence The great topmost sheet of the mass, that where hardly a light had twinkled or moved, becomes now a sparkling field of rhythmic flashing points with trains of traveling sparks hurrying hither and thit…
Time Travel Models
There are various ways that time-travel is described in stories and in physics. - Some of these differ in how paradoxes are (or are not) resolved. - Some differ in the physical limitations they impose.1 There are various meta-studies and attempted catalogs of the entire field. …
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