Ever written a story that just wasn’t working?

No matter what you tried, you couldn’t seem to get it right, and like a virus, this inability sent firestorms into your world, leaving you helpless.

Every writer I’ve met knows this feeling, as do I — in fact, I lived it everytime a new story came around.

That was, until I came in contact with the principle of antagonism.

I’ll explain what it means, why it’s one of the most important concepts in Storycraft, and how to utilize it and make your story the best version of itself.

But first, a…

I used to think that writing good dialogue was a gift I possessed until one short script kicked me in the teeth. I felt like a fraud for the first time. The character wasn’t sounding right, and without that, it felt flatter than plywood. What did I not try? I changed her speech pattern, going from regular English to Nigerian Pidgin. I lengthened her lines with more poetic phrases. Still no pulse. It was long and tedious. I pulled my hair out in search of answers. What I did not know then is what I will tell you now.

The 6 Tips

When…

Although nature thrives on mistakes, your stories could die if you make some of the mistakes outlined below. Some of these I learned the hard way, and others I gleaned from my observation of and interaction with many writers over the years.

I have structured each mistake thus;

• The mistake
• Why it is a mistake
• The solution

My reason for laying it out in this manner is to convince you of each point based solely on the merit of my argument. This helps me achieve two key things:

1. It helps me keep this article from being a listicle that just…

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Why go through the stress of creating a story only to create a story that’s weak? The weak story is the death of greatness. But what makes a story weak, and consequently, what makes a story good?

A weak story is a story that:

1. Doesn’t have the power to hold our interest from start to finish.
2. Doesn’t draw any deep emotions from us.
3. Doesn’t offer us any insight into the state of the world, society, or human nature.
4. Doesn’t entertain us.
5. Doesn’t get us to ask or worry about “what…

Stories are powerful but powerful as they are, they are easy to create. This is because all stories are similar, possessing a similar framework regardless of genre.

What does it take to tell a good story? Not a lot. Just a few key ingredients and you’re good to go. In this post, I cover 5 key ingredients you need to tell a good story worthy of holding attention and delivering a meaningful emotional experience.

5 ingredients for telling a good story

1. A character with a goal

No story can be told without a character or cast of characters. They can be a spoon, ant, board, or plant. But characters are useless without…

I came across a few tweets that criticized Polkadot’s on-chain governance mechanism. Normally, I would have scrolled past it, but these caught my attention because I’m a fan of Polkadot’s ecosystem design, and in particular, it’s blend of on-chain governance and forkless upgrades. I believe this combination is a huge leap forward for decentralization because of the speed it adds to the evolution of the network.

In Polkadot’s relatively short existence, on-chain governance and forkless upgrades have achieved the following:

• Redenominated the DOT via referenda
• Upgraded the runtime on x occasions without any forks
• Reduced the amount of DOTs a…

Decentralized finance has grown by over 88% in one year, increasing the TVL (total value locked) into platforms such as Maker, Compound, Uniswap, and Aave from under $1 billion to $88 billion at its peak. Given this level of growth, to say that it’s a new paradigm is to say that water is wet.

This growth has been very welcomed because it means that financial services that couldn’t reach over a large portion of the world’s population (estimated at 1.7 billion in 2017) are now within their reach. Anyone anywhere in the world can apply for a loan or provide…

Imagine a future where there are over a thousand blockchains, each dedicated to a specific use case. For example, a blockchain optimized for decentralized finance, another for decentralized identity issuance and verification, another for decentralized data storage, another for decentralized cloud computing, and yet another for decentralized privacy-enablement.

Now imagine that all these blockchains are interoperable, meaning that they can talk to each other — send tokens, call functions, initiate smart contracts, etc. Such a setup would obliterate the need for powerful, centralized middlemen across various industries.

For blockchain technology to revolutionize the world in the same way Bitcoin and…