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Some characters are active and others are reactive. Reactive characters mostly only react to things rather than make them happen so they can be very boring if not done right! Active characters are the ones that drive events by doing things and making stuff happen, these characters grab your ...

Emotional Charges and Diminishing Returns

Many writing methodologies suggest mapping out the emotional change of each scene. The scene either starts positive, and goes to either negative or “extra positive”, or starts negative and goes to positive or “extra negative” by the end of the scene.

So if a lovelorn ...

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In this Quackcast we chat about how objectification can rob the humanity from a character and turn them into a meaningless object which can in turn alienate your audience by making your work less relatable, but with things like porn where character is less important than the on screen ...

One of the great things about the original Star Wars movies was the strong sense of a grand, adventurous, and terrible history before the movie started. So much is hinted at through Obi Wan Kenobi about the Jedi Knights, Anakin Skywalker, great friendships, laser swords, and terrible war and loss ...

I'm a bit obsessed with “before” versions of characters. Where they start. The damaged dude or dudette who shows up at the beginning of a story REALLY needing a change in their lives, and usually not knowing it.

Even when the plot kicks off, these folks often don't ...

WRITING A SCENE


Here are some thoughts on writing that smallest unit of a story: the scene.


First off, what is a scene? What defines that little mug?

It's Change.

Something changes between the beginning and end of a scene.

Here's a way to write one if you ...

What goes up must fall down; Where there is a beginning must also have an end; Every opening must have a closing. KimLuster's 437 page masterful comic, The Godstrain, has been a Drunk Duck staple since 2012 when it first started and eventually earning a Feature recognition at the ...

Thursdays with Banes - The Murky Middle

A good way to put together a story is to figure out some essentials, first - Elements of Character, Plot and Theme, and Building some World and all that. We've talked about these things around here a lot, and we'll prolly continue to ...

Every building needs a skeleton in place before building begins, so that the end product will be sound. It’s no different with fantasy world building: before you begin gathering and using your story’s bricks and mortar (= the research) you need to have the world’s skeleton, or rigging ...

As all y'all probably are well aware, I am a hilarious genius. All cartoonists are hilarious geniuses; we have to be! Well, half the time anyway- the other half we spend hating ourselves and overcompensating for our inadequacies. It's a storied and well-documented tradition dating back to the ...