Writing what you know is one of those old canards that show up in writing advice, though it's not up there with things like “show, don't tell” and “this is supposed to be a literary essay - do not doodle in the margins”.

Or is that last one just ...

I've talked many times about story structure. Even with a structural approach, there are a lot of questions to be answered, struggles to be had, and hard thinking to be done to make a story work.

One big moment that I like thinking about early in the writing is ...

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How does where you grew up influence your comicing?
This idea interested me, so I posted about it on the DD forums and asked other people. I ...

Creativity can be an elusive quality and to many, one they can never achieve. However, it is something everyone has, and in this article I’ll go through three ways you can maximise your creative juices.

Make it fun
As kids, we spend a lot of time playing, be with ...

classic tale of cause and effect!

Our very own Pickle-Face made a forum topic on the Duck, asking people to create a basic ‘cause and effect’ statement on their comic.

The structure goes something like this: Say what happens, and then what the effect is in the story. This is ...

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 ...

As the Orthodox Easter approaches, I set out to make the traditional sweet bread. It's a tricky affair, because the recipes are often unreliable, or something might happen which you realise too late, and the dough won't rise, or won't pull apart as it should. I ended ...

Baneset Jones' Diary


We Three: Love Triangles

On the ‘terrible writing advice’ youtube channel, one of the running jokes is the over-reliance and overemphasis on love triangles in bad fiction.

Are they automatically bad, though?

They can be. If a character's main problem, regardless of genre, is having to ...

Classic X-men reprinted the Chris Claremont stories and included new Claremont stories A+

Chris Claremont is one of the all-time greats in comic book writing, and probably my favorite comics writer.

He's most famous for working on the Uncanny X-Men series from the 1970's to the early 1990 ...

The idea of genre is somewhat obvious, and somewhat murky. It can be rigid for some fans, and irrelevant to others.

I was reading some thoughts from readers of various niches that were very particular about what belongs in them and what doesn't. There were some complaints there about ...