What makes a treasure so special? Marushka explains it all!

Skeleton At The Feast

Dragons and writers can’t escape each other.

It’s not just that a dragon is a reliable addition to any story. It’s that writers and dragons are the same thing. They collect bits of the world*. When someone – an editor or English teacher or upstart hero – finally wrangles the mass of accumulated stuff away from them, the whole is recognizably different than the sum of its parts. With luck, it’s now classifiable as “treasure” (or “a first draft”).

In their quest, both seek unknown territory. Dragons are synonymous with those parts of the map where the cartographer gave up. Oh that’s good enough, they said: “Here be dragons.” Writers, unlike cartographers, can’t just add some colored shapes and go home**. They have to write themselves out of whatever corner they wrote themselves into – and where better to look for an unexpected plot device than the unknown? “Here be…

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