The best storytelling lessons hide inside the stories we already love. These posts mine craft wisdom from unlikely sources — Dexter’s Laboratory, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, the Critical Drinker, Viva La Dirt League, and even Zork — and turn fandom into writing instruction.
Author PlatformUCLA's 2026 Hollywood Diversity Report found that films reflecting the real makeup of the country earn the most, while the industry funded fewer of them in 2025, with people of color and women losing ground as leads, directors, and writers…
MemoirThree hours arguing with a Commodore 64 about where to put a brass lantern, and I was not mad, I was impressed: Zork understood English, remembered my moves, and responded like it was alive. Text adventures were collaborative fiction; SimCity…
Genre Writing GuidesFrom ancient oral traditions to modern horror, ghost stories tap the same deep nerve: the fear of death, the question of after, the suspicion that the line between living and dead is thinner than we admit. I work in this…
Genre Writing GuidesI own all fifteen White Wolf limited editions of the Eternal Champion, and Moorcock justified every dollar: a multiverse so interconnected that reading it feels like grasping a cosmology rather than finishing a series. You jump between Elric, Corum, and…
EntertainmentIn 1969 I saved for months to buy the big red Lord of the Rings, and my parents bet I would never finish it. I read it twice back to back, and it rewired how I understood story. Fifty-five years…
EntertainmentTwenty minutes was all I managed of Rings of Power, and everything since has confirmed the verdict: the writers do not understand Tolkien, flattening Galadriel from one of his best characters into a stock action hero. It looks like Middle-earth…
Pop Culture & Storytelling LessonsA lifelong Star Trek fan with over 200 hardcover Trek novels on what the original series got right about storytelling that most of its successors missed.
Character DevelopmentBehind the whisky and the profanity, the Critical Drinker dissects setup, payoff, and character arc more sharply than most paid film critics. The persona is a drunk ranting at a bar; the analysis is anything but. The press files him…
EntertainmentVilleneuve's Dune is gorgeous and largely faithful, but faithful is not the same as identical, and the gaps are where the real choices live, the cut dinner party, the vanished Alia, a dozen others. Some sharpened the story; some dulled…
Pop Culture & Storytelling LessonsLong before VR or open worlds, Zork held players spellbound with nothing but text and imagination. I spent the early 1980s navigating both college and its mazes. Here are nine highlights from the text adventure that proved gameplay could thrive…
Book CoachingDexter ran a secret lab out of his bedroom while his sister wrecked it every time she wandered in. Improbably, the cartoon is a decent primer on ghostwriting: invisible work, chaotic collaborators, rival writers, and the art of speaking in…
Character DevelopmentA knight asks a farmer for directions, walks three steps, returns, and asks again, and again, and what looks like absurdist comedy is really a meditation on free will and being programmed to serve someone else's story. Viva La Dirt…
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