"This is a formula, a master plot, for any 6000 word pulp story. It has worked on adventure, detective, western and war-air. It tells exactly where to put everything. It shows definitely just what must happen in each successive thousand words.

No yarn of mine written to the formula has yet failed to sell." Lester Dent was the creator of Doc Savage, and wrote a LOT of pulp fiction.

"Robert Downey Jr really sells the idea of being a design engineer. To be fair, the Iron Man script does him the great service of having him have to build himself a new heart in a cave in Afghanistan, thus having to make imperfect things and fettle them to fit. That feeling gets slightly lost later in his super-engineer pad where apparently nothing needs filing when it comes back from the rapid prototyping machine. But he still manages to exude a kind of mad joy at making things, a fundamental character trait in the way that having nice breasts is not." Sophie on the emotional truths of storytelling.

"Little stories are the internet’s native and ideal art form." Yes. This is a good one.

"Storytelling began as ceremony and evolved into ritual. It was commercialised in the middle ages, became big business in the 19th century and an international industry in the 20th. Today it is the ubiquitous wallpaper of the postmodern era." I still think there's some separation of plot/narrative to be considered, you can't deny Schrader makes some sensible points.

Tom Francis posits an alternate ending to Bioshock, that makes sense of the Vita-Chambers switcheroo, gives the player the agency they've craved, fixes some of the issues with the original ending, and asks you kindly to DROP THE GODDAMN RADIO.

"There are no cut scenes, no uninteractive passages, no portions where the characters are essentially "switched off" and indifferent to what the player does. Everything counts. Everything is part of the story." Excellent Emily Short piece on Blue Lacuna

"I thought this decision to attach a reward to the choice represented a failure of nerve on the part of the designers ... wedding a gameplay-reward to a decision that ought be governed by one's sense of character and motivation."

"What that means, though, is that when you’re looking at game writing in that way, you’re trying to fix a busted carburetor with an oil gauge and a cheese grater." Some sensible analysis; such a shame we need to write things like this.

"It's not quite a game, and while it does have branching, it doesn't allow the reader to affect the outcome of story - only their own experience of it." Adrian Hon on writing something better than Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. Some lovely visible thinking.

"Fray is being reborn as a quarterly printed book, and we need your help." A great move from Derek Powazek

"He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden".

Must read this - games and storytelling. Bruce is currently blowing me away at Etech06