Tale Foundry

"Why don't I feel like writing" is a really sad question to hear from anyone passionate about writing. But if you find yourself asking this, it doesn't mean your well has truly run dry; that you'll never write again. You and your craft might just need some... relationship counseling. Maybe we can help

My Neighbor Totoro is such a special movie. It's more than big furry fantasy creatures and happy children, although we love those things. It's the nuance of the world. When you watch this movie, you genuinely believe, if only for a moment, that there could be magic in the world... just like you did when you were a child. The ability to do that as a storyteller is a form of magic unto itself. Thankfully, Miyazaki's shared a little bit of his thoughts on how to perform this sort of wizardry. So, instead of just being entranced by another studio ghibli film, let's take a moment to learn from one.

Pan's labyrinth is a masterpiece, full of thought-provoking material. But the horrifying, child-eating Pale Man has a way of sticking in the mind. It feels like more than just a monster... Why?

The Name of the Wind is one of my favorite fantasy books, and I've been haunted by it's incredible magic system for FAR too long not to take an opportunity to make a video about it when it arises. Incidentally, I just learned that the magic in Name of the Wind is a type of magic used throughout the world... So, let's talk about it. Who knows? Maybe you'll come away with a fantasy of your own.

Who knew an edge-dwelling game like Cyberpunk 2077 could be so darn effective? The way it handles character and conflict are a great example of one of the cyberpunk genre's greatest strengths: punks as protagonists. There might even be something all of us writers can learn here, whether we have a special affinity for mirror shades or not.

In the old days, "thaumaturgy" was a word that meant wonder-working, but as science and technology developed, the nature of wonderment itself changed. Now, thanks to the proto-scientists of the renaissance and enlightenment, it means something far different. Not all magic is divine or supernatural or ineffably linked to the cosmos. Sometimes it's just a matter of perception. And the authors who know how to play with that can create some really interesting things.

Stephen King's Pet Sematary is a classic. There's plenty to say about it in terms of theme, tone, character, tension, drama, the list goes on. But strangely, the part of the story that's really stuck in my mind is the sort of a tangent. Behind all the dark things that happen in the story, there's one operator pulling the strings: The Wendigo. I had no idea what it was at the time, but I'm using this as an opportunity to find out more, AND to find out if King struck anywhere near the mark with his interpretation of it.

The alchemical homunculus shows up in plenty of modern stories, but as it turns out, the actual history is far stranger than fiction!

There's more to Poe than darkness and melancholy. There's wonder and fascination as well, a rarely-scene passion for the truths that shape our world: science. His science fiction isn't very well-known, so let's take a moment to appreciate it, shall we?

Breath is a fabulous symbol for spirituality and control. You see it used throughout history, mythology, and most important for our purposes, fiction. It's so often the tool people use to mediate and interact with their magic. Entire magic systems have been built on this interaction. But what about when the breath itself becomes the source of the magic? I'm not talking about firebreath or solar beams from the mouth; I'm talking about breath as we know it, made magical. Pneuma. The Ancient Greek term for it. In his book Imajica, Clive Barker puts this very idea to use. I found it so inspiring when I started to look into it, I had no choice but to make this video.

So much of Tolkien’s work has this strange, familiar depth you can scarcely find in any other place. His ents in particular touch on something so deeply human—so relatable and poignant—that we had to make a video about it. Tolkien’s ents are the intrinsic character of trees, given life. Something we’ve all seen before, something we’ve felt, realized to its full potential.

Settings can have just as much life as the characters in our stories, but if we’re careful, we can also turn our settings into characters unto themselves. The Gormenghast series by Mervyn Peake is perhaps the best example of this I’ve ever seen. He makes Gormenghast, the city-sized castle, a living, breathing, empathetic character, and he does it in so subtle a fashion you don’t even realized it’s happened until you finish the book and you find yourself thinking of the setting as an old friend.

We’ve been trained to recognize zombies as shambling bags of flesh. Undead punching bags. A convenient stock monster. But I don’t think that’s giving them enough credit. I think there are depths to the zombie archetype that have scarcely ever been explored. You might be surprised by just how much you have in common with these rotters. Maybe they’re not quite as monstrous as you expect.

You’ve probably heard of the chimera before. You PROBABLY think it’s just a mythical monster. But our connection to this strange beast goes far, far deeper than that. It has more to teach you than you might have guessed.

You always hear wizards going on about this in fantasy novels. “I call you by your true name and bind you!” Why, though? What does it do? Why does this keep showing up in our stories? You even see it in the old folk legends. Turns out the answer is a little more interesting—and a little more highly philosophical—than you might expect!

Edgar Allan Poe has a reputation for darkness and gloom, but that’s just because most people don’t know him well enough. He wrote some really bizarre, optimistic stories as well. Including probably the weirdest of the bunch: Mesmeric Revelation.

Some villains are absolute geniuses, able to engineer the world around them to their benefit. Some… not so much. Koschei the Deathless, a famous wizard from Slavic Folklore, is one such figure. In trying to escape the thing he fears most in the world, he actually brought himself closer to it than ever. And he’s not alone. You’d be surprised how many villains are foolhardy enough to follow the same path.

CAUTION: THIS VIDEO IS CRUEL TO SENSITIVE SOULS. Seriously. It will crush you if you have a tenderness for creativity and imagination. It’s all the cruelest realities we dreamers have to face rolled into one 20-minute video. But it’s a good one. The story we share here, about dragons, their death, and the eventual loss of all fantasy… it’s so good, it’s even instructional, provided you can keep watching through the tiers.

Hans Christian Anderson wrote a great many pleasant, adorable, child-oriented fairy stories. He also wrote some less-pleasant stories. The one I want to share with you here is among the least pleasant of them all. Not just because of the story’s contents, but because of what they mean. According to Andersen, your own shadow is just about the scariest monster there is.

“The King in Yellow” is a name I see thrown around in a lot of different media. Usually it’s treated like some kind of eldritch space monster a’la H.P. Lovecraft, but it… really isn’t very much like that at all. Really, it’s just a play. But that doesn’t stop it from being just as dangerous.

This isn’t an easy topic for anyone, but I think it’s about time we addressed it. Writing isn’t an easy passion to pursue. It weighs on you in ways that are difficult to understand—ways that can make you feel as if destiny itself is against you. But maybe it doesn’t have to be that way.

Okay, so maybe this isn’t precisely “in the holiday spirit”, but it’s interesting! Christmas is a very strange Holiday, and the story people tell each other about Santa Clause every year is so, so specific to the domestic life of parents and children. But seeing how they used to do it? What the ancestors of Santa Claus were like? It really sheds a new light on the whole ritual.