image by Ben Burgraff
When writing a historical fiction, it's very likely that you will need to include some actual historical personalities along with your historically-adept yet fictional cast.
Depicting a historical character is hard enough when there's a general consensus among historians and popular belief about who ...
Handling Controversial Historical Characters
Tantz_Aerine at 12:00AM, April 13, 2019Building Platonic Friendships (Part 2)
Tantz_Aerine at 12:00AM, March 9, 2019
Building a platonic friendship has its challenges, not only because as an author or creator of your webcomic you will need to handle the audience's propensity to assume your male and female lead will be romantically involved, but because of the demands you'll need to meet to make ...
SHAPES and Character
Banes at 12:00AM, Feb. 28, 2019
CHARACTER SHAPES
I remember hearing about this notion some time ago, on the dvd special features for an animated movie or show. I don't remember which one.
Characters derived from basic shapes can give a very strong impression of their basic personality type. This can help the audience feel ...
Hate: Raising the Poison Tree
Tantz_Aerine at 12:00AM, Feb. 16, 2019
With Valentine's day just behind us and a lot of talk of love, I thought I'd take a look on the exact opposite of love and affection- how do we write and display hatred in characters? How do characters hate, and what's the difference from rage?
In ...
Writing Mental Illness (Part 2)
Tantz_Aerine at 12:00AM, Jan. 19, 2019
How to Pick, Research and Implement Mental Disorder in a Character
So last time I talked in general about some basic concepts and principles about what constitutes mental illness, or, more accurately, mental disorder. The important thing to remember and keep from all of that is this set of truths ...
Writing Mental Illness (Part 1)
Tantz_Aerine at 12:00AM, Jan. 12, 2019
Writing a character with mental illness can be a very tricky thing. Writers usually go for the extremely rare, exotic and spectacular: multiple personality disorders, extreme manifestations of psychopathy or sociopathy, high functioning autism with that ever alluring ‘savant’ magic going for the character, bombastically spectacular schizophrenia… in many ways ...
Writing Your Own OC Spinoffs
Tantz_Aerine at 12:00AM, Jan. 5, 2019
I'm not sure how many creators do it, but I often place my original characters in different settings, writing out stories about them very much like I'd write fanfiction about some established franchise.
It's even more fun when I do it mixing them up with characters from ...
Convergent Creation Part 2
Amelius at 12:21PM, Dec. 16, 2018
Last weekend we discussed that strange phenomenon of independent creation, where there's more than a passing resemblance to another work but it's not a case of plagiarism. Interestingly, not long after I posted that I saw not one but two instances of independent creation being brought up (though ...
Playing favourites
Emma_Clare at 12:00AM, Nov. 30, 2018
I have favourite characters. There, I said it.
Although I would love to think that I love them equally, and on some level there is truth to that, there are a few I continually come back to and just want to get into them more. Now, just because they are ...