It's all fine and exciting when using lore and myth to create new stories. Especially when it comes to modern genres like urban fantasy, it can yield pretty alluring and impressive results! From ancient Greek mythology to all kinds of Asian myths and legends, to Norse mythology and Egyptian ...

With more time spent at home, I have been able to dive into some of my favorite past-times that I used to do when I was middle school aged. One of them being playing video games. Growing up, Squaresoft and the Final Fantasy video game series completely shaped my identity ...

Nearly a billion people, perhaps more, are being confined in their homes as you read these lines, due to the Covid-19 quarantine to stem the pandemic. A good percentage are going stir-crazy right now, or are juggling with the limitations and necessary work-arounds of having to stay in a single ...

Wise men are like valuable spice for a story. They are also a wonderful plot device, or an extremely cheesy one, depending on how the character is used and written.

Wise men (and women) are often the moral compass to the main characters, or hold some kind of answer to ...

Therapists are the type of character whose occupation can easily seep into their ‘off the clock’ life. It's not something that can often be helped. Psychologists don't ‘turn off’ their perception of behavioral patterns and personality analyses, the same way you can't ‘unsee’ the rabbits after you ...

I've already written a bunch of articles on writing mental illness, so I figured I should write about writing therapists as well!

Oh, the woes for therapist representation in narrative works! All the stereotypes are there: from the shrink that is actually a little (or a lot) loopy and ...

The word for ‘porn’ in Greek is unsurprisingly ‘porn’. But its vernacular synonym is a word that in reality means ‘tack-on’ or ‘added scrap’. It signifies the common (or at least until recently common) assumption that scenes with explicit sexual activity were there to pad the runtime for a movie ...

So on occasion, there's a lot of controversy over gender bending characters- that is, to change the character's sex from male to female or vice versa.

I'm not going to talk about my take on this controversy. At least not in this article.

What I want to ...

As it has been seen very painfully lately in TV, the best story, with the most excellent buildup and most powerful cast of characters will just collapse if the ending isn't good enough.

A technically happy ending that isn't good enough is not going to cut it- again ...

The lifeblood of your comic is the characters in it. They offer a way for the audience to be invested in the world and contextualise any conflicts that will inevitably occur. So it is important that the characters don’t come across as flat. A flat character is one dimensional ...