Being a Better Writer: Dragons in Stories · 7:21pm March 3rd
Welcome back, writers! Unless you’re new to the site (welcome, if so) you know the drill, and you know what you’re in for. This is Being a Better Writer, your weekly article series on all sorts of writing topics from pacing to genre to grammar. And today, well … As you may have guessed from the title up there, we’ve got an interesting topic to talk about.
A topic, I might add, that I chose for two reasons. The first of which is that I was on a panel at LTUE about this very topic, and after fielding some questions from the audience figured “You know, this would be a worthwhile BaBW topic. But also because if you check last week’s news post, you’ll see that I just finished the draft of another dragon novel, that being Axtara – Armies and Accounting. So yeah, doing a BaBW post on dragons feels … appropriate.
By the way, you really should check that news post. There’s a preview for Armies and Accounting, as well as a discussion of what’s next, and a question for fans I’d really like to see some answers to concerning Royal Road.
But that’s that post, and this is Being a Better Writer. So click on that link for the news, and then keep on with this post. Where we’re going to talk about dragons. No, not metaphorical ones. Literal. As in “fire-breathing beasts of Fantasy” that you see heroes slay … but also run a bank.
Yeah, that’s quite the jump, isn’t it? How did dragons go from what they started as to what they are now? Well, that’s our subject today. Again, we’re not talking metaphor here. We’re talking actual dragons. Western dragons, I might add. Though I’ll talk about Eastern ones as well.
Oh, and if you’re wondering why this is important for writing, well … If you ever want to write anything about dragons, it may be worth knowing how the usage of them has changed over the decades. Because it very much has.
So hit that jump, and let’s talk.
