I’m Ziv. Beta-reader; slush-reader; everything-reader.
Assistant Editor at Diabolical Plots; Associate Editor at PodCastle.
Find me on Twitter; I’m quite vague.
Here are some pieces on narrative structure, writing craft,
and on the stories that keep buzzing around in my head long after they’re over.
Writing With Mirrors
A storycraft video on one of fiction’s most powerful tools: similarity and contrast.
This video is about how different parts of a story can reflect each other, echo each other, feel fundamentally connected. Once you start looking for them, you’re going to find mirrors in all your favorite stories — and learn how to build them in your own.
Story Structure Lessons From The Discworld
For something as ephemeral as a story, does it even make sense to talk about its “shape” or “structure”?
It does, but we often lack the concepts and terminology. That’s what we’ll build up—using the MICE approach, examples from popular media, and most of all, Terry Pratchett’s brilliant Discworld series, and the many deeply distinct sub-series that comprise it.
This video series is aimed at both writers and readers, and does not require familiarity with the Discworld books.
A Fascinating Tension: Religious Themes and Ideas in SFF
I visit Parinita Shetty’s Marginally Fannish podcast to discuss how faith and religion are portrayed in popular genre fiction.
We go into how these religion is in some ways similar to other “non-default” identifiers, often marginalized or stereotyped, but in some ways extremely different.
There is so much to grapple with here. To me personally, that’s exactly why I want to see it grappled with.
Knives Out: A MICE Case Study
Rian Johnson’s superb Knives Out has stabbed its way into our hearts and minds. It’s not often that a screenplay so expertly crafted makes this kind of a splash.
We’ll use Knives Out to learn about MICE — a handy approach to story focus and structure — and MICE to learn some intriguing points about Knives Out.
Star Trek: Discovery and the Theory of Pain
Every heroic tale carries an implicit definition of what “heroic” means. Every dramatic victory is a fictional portrayal of how victory is achieved.
What about Star Trek: Discovery? Who are its victors? What does its heroism look like? How do the crew of the Discovery win?
The answer will tell us a lot about Discovery’s moral landscape, and its view of the world. And the answer, based on Discovery’s first season, is… unsettling.
Themes in Too Like The Lightning
Ada Palmer’s Too Like The Lightning constructs a utopian society — but not one it thinks can survive. It plots the course of that society’s collapse — but not because they did anything wrong.
It’s a novel that is dizzying, idiosyncratic, philosophical. In these essays, I gather up hints and threads to bring the book’s statement, as I see it, to the surface.
Writing Q&A
For several years, I was active on a Q&A site for writing, answering questions large and small.
Here are some of my favorites (and here’s all my hundreds of answers; yes, all of 'em).