Dissecting Literature

I’ve heard so many bad advices against writer’s block, considering how you should do literally anything that’s not writing or just wait until it passes. That’s how you end up sitting for months thinking you should write but you don’t want to, filling your everyday life with misery. A much better option is to re-experience the enthusiasm you felt when you started the project. I personally know at least two failsafe methods for this. First, chat with someone who loves your work, about your work. Chat with a beta reader who freaking loved that part when those things happened and ramble on for hours about how and why that scene was awesome. No advices, no critique, just plain glorifying of a few good points of your text, no matter how much you’ve written already. The second is, try and entice a friend who’s interested. Ask around in your group chat or something who would like to hear about your story, and if someone’s up for it, speak about the plot, the characters, the world and what you’...

When I did my research about the topic, I was pleasantly surprised, that there are more and more articles out there that point out the difference between a psychopath and a sociopath. I admit it is hard enough to spot either and even harder to tell which one we see because there are a lot of overlaps between the behavior of a psychopath and a sociopath. Sociopathy is not a diagnostic term in psychology, instead, it is called antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), and I think it is only fitting to call the child by its name. Let’s start with the similarities! Both psychopaths and sociopaths lack empathy and tend to manipulate others, and because of that, they can walk down the dark path towards being a criminal. Although some say that people with ASPD have a conscience – that little voice in the head that tells you, that you are doing something wrong – it is really faint, while in psychopaths it just doesn’t exist. I must point out as I did in the previous blogpost about psychopaths, t...

Hey! Dar here with another random tidbit topic. Recently we saw a youtube video about the problems with YA fiction and there was an interesting point in the comment section. One commenter remarked that there is an uneven gender representation in the YA and adult fiction literature, because there’s hardly anything for boys too old for MG and too young for gritty dark fantasy. Similarly, there’s next to no books that are for adult women other than romance. If you want to find an epic fantasy that’s not primarily for men, you’ll have to dig REALLY deep (and you’ll probably find Jemisin’s The Broken Earth). I’ve never thought about this, but there’s truth in that sentiment. So I’ll try to start a conversation about this: do you know of any books that fit those illustrious categories? Are there YA books aimed at boys or epic fantasy/sci-fi novels targetting women audience? What could qualify as those in the first place? What could be the focus of an adult fiction for women or a young adult ...

I think I’m just gonna throw my half-baked ideas and see what sticks for people. Here’s the first: To sum it up: a dark fantasy land where the dead still feel everything that happens to their body and are actually glad if a necromancer passes by and ressurects them. It starts somewhat like this: “People have the wrong image of dying. They tell you it is the end of pain, the end of suffering and sorrow, but they are lying. The pain doesn’t stop, it never does. Death only severs the link between your will and your life, trapping you inside a coffin of your own, decomposing body. Because you feel everything, oh, yes. You feel rot eating at your flesh. You feel your unbeating heart shrink day by day, you feel the cold biting at you from every corner. You feel the maggots, the vermin, all the disgusting and maddening things you cover your eyes from until nothing but your bones remain. And even then, your immortal soul, the flickering consciousness that cannot die remains attached to the dus...

I’ve noticed if you write enough, you eventually receive a strange superpower where you can tell what story would a person have if you wrote them even after a glance. Like when you’re on a bus and WriterSight kicks in and suddenly you somehow know the guy with the hair and in a jacket must be a quirky character who’s more competent than he shows and also probably has a favorite axe named Liana. WriterSight is weird. Anyone knows this phenomenon? No? Just me? Dar

Hey there, traveller! So, this is a new section coming out every wednesday-ish (we'll see). About what, you may ask? Well, it is no secret that we are currently working hard on the first book of a five part fantasy series and we are really determined to publish it as soon as we feel it's ready. That, my friends, is an arduous journey, full of terrors. Sometimes we cry laughing, sometimes just cry, other times things somehow move forward. Behind the Scalpel (or BtS just to confuse K-POP fans; oooor, as I originally wanted to call it: Tales of Woe and more Woe, but it’s not a really encouraging title, is it?) is a weekly segment about our work, the process of publishing your own novel, juggling a PhD and med school with writing and the advices and bullshit we found along the way. All this covered up in sarcasm and dark humour, because life is only bareable if you find your own misery funny. For the first occasion, I'd like you to meet our WIP. I saw that there is a format for...

A villain – if you have one – can make or break a book. When we attempt to understand their motivations we often bump into some kind of mental illness or condition that is not neurotypical. In the following weeks I will try to cover the most popular mental conditions of the villains, starting with the most common yet most misunderstood one: the psychopaths. When we read the story of a serial killer, we can go on shrugging and saying he was a psychopath like this term explain everything. The most important thing that I want to nail down, that yes, many serial killers were psychopaths but not all of them, and not all psychopaths become murderers. The common trait of a psychopath and their most prominent feature is the lack of empathy. Everything else is the consequence of this –   if they want something, they will get it and they won’t think of the feelings and needs of others for a moment. If it is their best interest, they can be charming, they manipulate or get rid of anyone...

Okay, first I have some minor apologies to make. Our last post was huge, so I’ll try to make this shorter, or separate it into parts to be more digestible. It’s just that the human mind has so many corners and layers I want to explore, that sometimes my fingers go wild on the keyboard. But let’s start today’s topic before even this one paragraph grows into hundreds of words. The “damsel-in-distress” is the base story element in a lot of childhood fairy tales but it appears in much older stuff, like the myths of ancient civilizations. We can meet it as early as the Indian epic, the Ramayana, where Sita (the wife of Prince Rama) gets captured by an evil demon king named Ravana, and the prince goes on an epic quest to save her. But you can find this trope in ancient Greece, among the many folk tales made famous by the Grimm brothers and so on. A fair maiden captured by the villain and waiting for the hero to save her is familiar to anyone, who had a childhood. Little boys dress up a...

We all know “sexy bad guys” from books, movies, and series. You need only to look into any popular contemporary work and I bet you can point out at least one of them. In recent years there is a tendency for them to move from an interesting side character position to the main love interest of a female protagonist in more and more novels. They share many common traits. They’re often possessive, arrogant, self-absorbed, have power in the society, can be narcissists or psychopaths (we will have another blog post about them later), and – of course – they are insanely handsome. All women fall for them, but the big question is, why? The trope works, just look at the members of TeamDamon from the Vampire Diaries, the fandom of Rhysand from the Court of Thornes and Roses, and the millions of people who bought the Fifty Shades of Grey. How can it be, that these characters are considered irresistible or at least very attractive? This phenomenon has many different reasons, most of them are rooted ...

Hey there, traveller! Have you ever asked yourself when reading about a particular trope or listening to some advice about how to implement it the correct way – why? Why are bad guys sexy? Why are damsels in distress reveal the knight in shining armor in our souls? Why are wizards skinny and physically inept? Why do we feel what we do when encountering a particular trope or phenomen? Why some tropes work and some flop? Well, together we shall attempt to answer these questions from every possible direction writers and readers never even possibly think of. How does our biology affect these tropes? Our history, our genetics, our psyche? Where do these tropes originate and what makes them truly hit that nerve? With a varied background in biology, psychology and medicine we will shed some lights on common literary effects we all know from a different perspective. Tune on with us each Sunday for another topic. We’ll be waiting for you, and YOU only. Cheers, Dar & L...