It has taken me twenty-five years to watch the entire film of “Bridges of Madison County” starring Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood. It tells the story of an Italian War bride living in rural Iowa who meets the Worldly National Geographic photographer who has come to her small town to ...

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Today we're having a chat about fantasy fiction! Mainly books and the fantasy writing that inspired us and that we love! Faves like Tolkien, Fritz Leiber ...

Everyone loves a genius! The character that has the answers, or makes the deductions, or solves the puzzles for the team. The guy (or gal) that will have a gift for noticing what nobody else does, sees the connections that elude everyone else. Even in stories that aren't of ...

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The process of adaptation is quite interesting. Stories go through all sorts of changes when they're transferred from one medium to another. A lot of the ...

I like mentor characters.

This is not just me of course; the mentor and protagonist relationship is powerful. Some of the best moments in many stories are the first encounter with the mentor, the training and sense of discovery for the protagonist, and the eventual loss of the mentor character ...

Nowhere to Hyde

Last time we talked about characters who are not what they seem. Folks who are introduced one way but are revealed to have a secret nature, or hidden depths, or a hidden agenda.

Another type of “hidden side” I enjoy is a little less universal, but can ...

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For the month of October we've decided to look at a different movie franchise each week, starting with Indiana Jones! Banes and Tantz have way more ...

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Copyright is a complicated thing and something that all creators should have a little bit of a working understanding off! Checkout my newspost lined bellow for more ...

The Death of the Method?


In the past, I've been a proponent of the Banes Method - really, the Save the Cat Method - of story construction and story improvement.

The method became all the rage in film production in Hollywood apparently - and has received some criticism as well, for being ...

Nothing is going right for poor Doctor Jekyll… Whatever can go wrong for the good doctor DOES. He gets drenched in mud, loses a high status job, and then loses his fiancée to another man. But he's a nice guy, he holds none of that against anyone, all he ...