This is your brain on structural anthropology.

Human beings are hardwired to classify things in pairs, particularly in opposing pairs. Salt and pepper. Hot and cold. Cats and dogs. Left and right. Order and chaos. Yin and yang. One can argue that our propensity for arranging the world in dichotomous pairs has contributed to some of our most telling social issues of …

Sketchnoting the Story Grid Five Commandments

I love sketchnoting and I'm a huge bullet journal nerd so I thought I'd combine those things with storycraft, something else I'm crazy about. This is what happened!

A Story Grid Analysis of Tailchaser’s Song

I apply the Story Grid Editor's Six Core Questions to one of my favorite Talking Animal fantasies.

Fantasy is not a genre

Except that it is. In the Story Grid universe, we editors talk a lot about genre. Genre defines the core of a story. Genre is how the writer meets reader expectations. From it we derive conventions and obligatory scenes. In a very real sense, genre is the heart of the Story Grid method. According to …

Rags to Written

Someone asked me, "Why do you call your website Rags to Written?" Aside from the fact that it has a good ring to it, the phrase suggests a transformation from unfinished to complete, from tattered to done. It encapsulates a writer's journey and it is, in and of itself, a story. In a sense, it …