On Stories
How to Create a Kickstarter Account
1. Go to www.kickstarter.com, where you’ll see the form below. Enter your name, email, and password (you’ll be asked to enter your email and password twice), click to verify you’re not a robot, and click to create an account.2. Once you’ve clicked to create an...
Controlling the Fable-Makers: Plato’s “Republic” and the Role of Stories in Moral Education
Battle Between King Arthur and Sir Mordred, William Hatherell (1850)Being the overachiever that I am, I somehow ended up with 20 college credits and two part-time jobs for Fall 2025, and in an effort to lighten my reading load this fall (about 400 pages a week, if I’m...
The Five Food Groups of Fiction
It’s easy for me to overanalyze what I’m reading. To lose myself in narrative structure and character arcs and forget to enjoy the story for its own sake. And when I’m not doing that, it’s easy to feel guilty for reading fun books—for picking up The Hunger Games...
Frodo Failed (But That’s Okay)
A few weeks ago, I was reflecting on the ending of The Lord of the Rings—not the movie ending, but the original ending of the book, in which Frodo returns home to the Shire only to find that it’s been destroyed by Saruman despite all his efforts to protect it. As a...
Timeless Writing Advice from Aristotle’s “Poetics”
So somehow I ended up with 20 college credits, 2 part-time jobs, and a novel releasing in November. Whoops. In an effort to stay on top of my typical over-achiever-ness, I’ve started tackling some of my college textbooks over the summer. (Given that the books in...
Why Writers Don’t Need to Go to College
No, you don't need to go to college to be a writer. But I am anyway. In the last four years of my life, I have attended two colleges (three come August) in two states with three different majors and over a dozen professors, studying almost every topic imaginable and...