I have been thinking a lot about dystopias recently, prompted by a precarious visit to my old smuggling work-in-progress. My aim was to flesh out the world building and establish precisely the kind of dystopia the unfortunate main character lived within. Perhaps inevitably, as I waded into what I hoped to be a sea of multidimensional compelling dystopia, I found a shallow imitation of it. The obvious questions is: what makes a compelling dystopia?...
Writing is hard. Did I ever mention that?
I made progress.
Rewriting long forgotten snapshots of work
Writing is hard. Perhaps that’s an oversimplification. The mechanics of writing are easy, especially in a day and age with computers with spelling and grammar checkers. You can even use an app that tells you how good your writing is1. It’ll tell you when you end a sentence on a preposition, or when you’re too passive, or use too many adverbs. None of these tools are perfect, but they do a good job of propping up one side of the process to make life easier for the writer....