I'm wounded but you can't see it!


A lot of stories involve a wounded and/or flawed character. It's a staple of strong storytelling; a character has some kind of pain or wound to overcome, and that's the inner journey they take along with whatever outward ...

I remember when cell phones began to get popular and pervasive. As a fan of horror movies, I said to myself “well, that's the end of a lot of horror stories!”

With cell phones, it doesn't matter if you're stuck at camp or in a creepy house ...

Yesterday Greece's most iconic and proliferate composer, Mikis Theodorakis, passed away at the age of 96. He was a symbol for social activism and human rights. He was in the Greek resistance in 1943 as a teen, then in the anti-junta fight, he was tortured, exiled, prosecuted, and still ...

Ideas both big and deep can - and has - been explored in Sci Fi. Some themes that have resonated with me include ‘What it Means to be Human’. This could be said to be the point of ALL fiction in a way I suppose. But to explore humanity through the lens ...

I was fishing for smelts the other day and scooped up an old bottle, with a rolled-up paper inside. It contained the following:

In older literature I think it was common to have a story told by a narrator who was never a part of the action. Someone who may ...

The 31 May 2021 article related to “Color Theory as a Rewind Machine” mentioned how colors could be used intentionally as a way to transport the reader to different time periods. At the end, I posed the question whether anyone had ever used a specific decade’s color palette in ...

Welcome to my Underground Layers

-Banes, your pop culture references are as on point as ever!



I've talked about story structure here many times, normally in similar ways.
A different approach to character and story, one I haven't used much personally, is what we could call the “onion ...

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We have a chat about historicity in this Quackcast. What IS historicity? It's historical authenticity basically but a nicer way of saying it! It's pretty ...

I read some writing…advice? Or commentary? Or something like that years ago that pointed out how often amateur writers will create Protagonists who are writers. If I'm remembering correctly, this was expressed as a bad thing, probably because it's overdone. On the one hand, they say write ...

So the other day I came across a whole twitter quarrel between a famous Spiderman artist and an anonymous (potentially teenaged) “art fixer”. Usually I tend to support or find some kind of explanation or excuse for the underdog- the non-famous, small account, low tier, unrecognized artist rather than the ...