Enter your email address to receive notifications of new articles and fiction by email.
To trope or not to trope…
…that is the question. Three opinionated writers argue over whether ’tis nobler
to take up arms against a sea of overused tropes or write them anyway.
What Happened to Competence Porn?
In 2009, Leverage writer John Rogers wrote in a blog post about how viewers enjoyed “watching competent people banter and plan,” something his team had come to refer to as “competence porn.” This phenomenon, now named, has loosely cropped up…
Should You Write a Manic Pixie Dream Girl?
You’re reading this on the internet, so you’ve probably heard of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. You probably have a decent idea of what she is and where she exists in the world of fiction. There’s like a seventy percent…
How to Write an Enneagram 1 Character
One of the hardest things about writing characters is making sure they’re different enough from each other that a reader can tell them apart. There are multiple ways to do this: base them on real people, give them qualities of…
An Open Letter to All of My Facebook Friends
Dearest Acquaintance Facebook Tells Me I Once Knew, I don’t recall the exact moment we became friends or even who sent the initial request. It was the thing to do at the time, a way to say, I see you…
Channel Your Inner Twitter Mob: A Guide to Communicating Effectively
You’ve got something to say. But how do you say it so that people will listen? How do you preemptively head off pointless arguments? Keep people reading until the end? How can you be sure you’ll get your meaning across…
Submit your writing…
We believe that good fiction doesn’t have to have an unhappy ending. We believe conflict can be resolved, characters can make good choices, and fiction that’s fun to read is just as important as fiction that reveals the dirty undersides of humanity.
We want to create a space in the world of short fiction where hope can thrive. Where you can read a story and not worry about being subjected to some horrific image or soul-crushing moral, however artful it might be. Where happily-ever-afters are treated with the same reverence as literary fiction, and you don’t have to choose between quality literature and faith in humanity.
The Lit Nerds 