This is the fascinating and harrowing tale of a person discarded by society, used up, pushed to the side and forced through the cracks. You are shown life from his unique perspective and taken into his dark world, increasingly farther on the fringes of every day life. And yet he ...
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 ...
15 Years, I Keep On Duckin'
Amelius at 12:13PM, Jan. 6, 2019
Oh what a coincidence, that my newspost day should fall upon the date of my 15th year on this very site! So naturally, on this anniversary, I'd like to open up and reflect on how the Duck has left a major impact on my life and work.
Every year ...
Imitation Flavor
Amelius at 10:14AM, Dec. 30, 2018
The first thing you need to know before we get into this discussion is the following: You can't copyright a style. It's true! Copyright protects an artist's expression of an idea, but not the ideas themselves, the technique, or procedure in making that style. Keep that in ...
Making 3D Comics by Genejoke Part 4 - Lighting and Rendering
Banes at 12:00AM, Dec. 27, 2018
This is the final part of Genejoke's epic on creating 3D Comics.
Part 4
Da finale
Lighting and rendering.
This will be the final part as there are definite limits to what can be conveyed just through the written word. I will start a video tutorial series in the ...
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 ...
Purpose of subplots
Emma_Clare at 12:00AM, Dec. 14, 2018
Last week, we looked at ways to prevent the middle of your story from sagging. One of those suggestions was using a subplot or two to help flesh out both the world and characters of your story.
For those of you who are a bit confused as to what a ...
QUACKCAST 404 - Strong characters
Ozoneocean at 12:00AM, Dec. 11, 2018
LISTEN on our new player!
Listen on Stitcher - https://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=224306&refid=stpr
Or TuneinRadio - https://tunein.com/podcasts/Books–Literature/Drunkduck-Quackcast-p1150194/
We mined Tantz's Saturday newspost for our discussion topic: Strong characters and how to write GOOD ones!
What is a strong character? Well ...
Serialized vs Episodic Storytelling
Tantz_Aerine at 12:00AM, Dec. 1, 2018
There is a general trend in mainstream media and sequential art to generally value serialized works (in shows, series, comics, etc) over episodic ones. They are considered to be more elegant, more dynamic and more interesting than episodic ones. While this might definitely hold true, is it so as a ...