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Helping Writers Become Authors
Personal blog · helpingwritersbecomeauthors.comwriting
Helping Writers Become Authors is a personal blog at helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com about writing. Since 2018, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 5 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-26, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked for K.M. Weiland's posts on story archetypes and character arcs, some of which are free online. Commenters call the author great and say the archetype work has a lot to learn from.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
What Hacker News says?
I think there's a difference between lean prose and choppy prose. [1] Lean prose (Hemingway) is elegant simplicity. Choppy prose (most amateur writers) is tiring and jarring. Despite their seemingly shared characteristic of simplicity, it takes a lot of practice to achieve the former. [1] https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/common-writing-m...
Comment linking /common-writing-mistakes-choppy-prose/
on “A blogging style guide”> There is a certain cowardice in how we deal with death in the contemporary west. It's because we have a dearth of true elders right now. Not in age, but in temperament and learning. I got interested in story telling during COVID and managed to find a great author (K.M. Weiland) that went in deep on the archetypes of story. Her hook was essentially: "What happens after the Hero's Journey/happily ever after?" And th…
Comment linking /archetypal-character-arcs-pt-6-the-crone-arc/
on “Grief gets an expiration date, just like us”a Film is a collection of shots, scenes and sequences. Shots are fairly easy to detect. Most editing software comes with built in shot detection. This approach promises to detect scenes. I’m not enough of a coder to know if it is valid, but I can certainly imagine that it is a solvable problem. Most scenes are defined by location, and movies makers like each locatation to be distinct from the preceding one. To my mi…
Comment linking /movie-storystructure/finding-nemo/
on “PySceneDetect – A tool for detecting scenes in movies”This is cool! I've been playing around with GPT-3 a bunch lately with the same goal in mind. I spent too much of the afternoon feeding it a few 7-point plot examples like [0] and then brainstorming my own with it. It was incredibly fun, and GPT-3 is surprisingly good at casting a story. Feed it "Main characters:" or "Eamon's character arc:" and comes up with interesting examples. It takes a bunch of tries, but it's…
Comment linking /book-storystructure/warbreaker/
on “Sci-fi story coauthored by GPT-3, including in-character human/AI chats”If you really want a trip try out K.M. Weiland's Archetypes work: https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Archetypal-Character-Arcs-Jou... She has it all online for free here too, with a good comments section: https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/how-to-write-arc... The work ends up being a bit pop-psych in a strange but interesting way. A lot to learn there and take home, not ust for story writers.
Comment linking /how-to-write-archetypal-character-arcs/
on “Music has scales / raagas. What about storytelling in movies and prestige shows?”