Every human culture tells stories.  Some of them are meant to chronicle actual events, whether it’s a creation story or the history of a city or country.  Others are explicitly fictional, such as fables, tall tales, and fairytales.  Isn’t it…

(Originally published in the Dec 2004 issue of Writer’s Digest and reprinted by WD in its 2005 Writer’s Yearbook Extra) Often we like to imagine the (probably imaginary) good old days when editors searched for traces of gold in the…