Daniel Honey

Main Points • Families are often left out of fiction to keep things simple, make characters sympathetic, force growth, and justify personalities. • Leaving families out often curtails profound depth and interesting conflicts. • Families provide longing, bitter-sweet love, isolation, tragedy, endearment, connectedness, responsibility, shared history/culture, meaningful side conflicts, can turn the mundane into the interesting (especially in fantastical settings), and are too often missing. • Going beyond the familiar tropes of orphaned heroes or immediately killed off family can…

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Main Points • Great villains: • Are proactive; • Are sympathetic or have self-justified views, or unique motivations; • Often come from wildly different cultures; • Have as profound character arcs as the heroes and overcome their own internal/external conflicts; • Have extremist ideologies or push positive/negative values to the extreme; • Have wildly different perspectives and worldviews; • Have immense mystique and presence; • Powerfully mirror the hero’s journey/arc or are the negative fulfillment of the hero’s flaw •…

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Main Points • Comparing your work to others can be inspirational and disheartening. • There’s a gap between our tastes and our work (initially); we need to keeping striving until our work matches our tastes (Ira Glass). • Compare apples to apples–similar experience and capacity (the number of people working on a single book). • By comparing, we can learn what we have to fix, what’s out there, learn by immersion, and find inspiration. • Comparing can bring false hope:…

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