Posts belonging to Category Reviews and technique
Posted by Ravyn on December 20, 2010
I’ve already mentioned my tendency to get inspiration from books in military reading lists, but most of those are, well, military-related. Politics, governance, various aspects of what it’s like to be in a war, strategy, the occasional riff on globalization—not technique, so much. And then I was reading Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, a novel [...]
Categories: Concepts, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Reviews and technique, Technique, World-building |
Tags: anachronism, background, Gates of Fire, historical settings, Pressfield, roleplaying, World-building, writing | 
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Posted by Ravyn on September 22, 2009
Sometimes, there are people who just don’t realize they’ve gotten a message across, so they pick up a sledgehammer and pound it in, again and again ad infinitum, nauseum, etc, even to the point of the defenestration of the offending book, DVD, video… you get the idea. Such was the case with ‘Cloudy with a [...]
Categories: Characterization, Cliche, Reviews and technique |
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Posted by Ravyn on June 10, 2009
Still here. Still snarking Ron Miller’s “Silk and Steel” as scanned by vandonovan. I almost feel guilty; this text is like shooting fish in a barrel. This time, I’m going to start skipping things; we’re getting on for the point where it stops quite qualifying as something [...]
Categories: Description, For Writers, Reviews and technique, Technique, Voice and Style |
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Posted by Ravyn on June 9, 2009
Welcome back to the dissection of the two pages of Silk and Steel scanned by vandonovan of LiveJournal. (Who apparently decided to read the whole book; one must salute that kind of bravery.) Last time, you got a mere taste of the horror; this time, we’re getting into the [...]
Categories: Description, For Writers, Reviews and technique, Technique |
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Posted by Ravyn on June 8, 2009
As most of you have probably gathered right now, I am one of those people who is death to bad writing. So you can imagine my response when, last Saturday, this scan of two pages of monstrosity from vandonovan from LiveJournal was tossed to me by one of my friends. [...]
Categories: Description, For Writers, Reviews and technique |
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Posted by Ravyn on June 2, 2009
It’s not often I watch a movie and find multiple techniques worth discussing, but watching “Up” definitely made for an exception to that rule.
Along with a beautiful display of economy of dialogue, “Up” demonstrated a technique I have a distinct fondness for: making a physically absent character as active a part [...]
Categories: Characterization, Characters in the world, For Roleplayers, For Writers, Reviews and technique, Technique |
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Posted by Ravyn on June 1, 2009
Over the last year, I’ve found a lot of inspiration and a number of lessons in children’s movies. So when Pixar’s “Up” made it to theaters, I ventured out, notebook in hand, to see what I could find. “Up” did not disappoint; in fact, it was worth several pages [...]
Categories: Dialogue, For Roleplayers, For Writers, Reviews and technique, Technique |
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Posted by Ravyn on July 20, 2008
So what can we learn from a story in which the main characters have a vocabulary of six words between them? A lot, apparently. The movie’s writers may want us to question what is human, to look into the idea of love and loyalty and duty, to see the dark path down which consumerism and [...]
Categories: Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Reviews and technique, Scening, Technique, Thematics, World-building |
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