Banes is taking a short break for the Thursday post, so I'll be filling in for a some unspecified number of posts. How many exactly? Well, how long is a piece of string? How long is the coastline of Britain? That was an academic paper ('How Long Is the ...

One of the main drivers of story is the principle of CONTRAST.

A character in a traditional story arc begins one way and ends up in a very different state of being - the underdog to the victorious hero, or the innocent, unaware victim to the final survivor, or the selfish ...

Photo: “Mies Couch”. Drawn by Plymayer. (January 2025)

I rewatched two-thirds of Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy, skipping over the first film of the series to focus on the latter two. The trilogy consists of Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight each film spaced roughly a decade apart. The ...

There's nothing more frustrating when a character dies from a situation that had no reason occuring except perhaps that the writers wanted to be edgy and make the story have more gravitas with a random death that's forced into the plot.

I've talked often over the years ...

Last Week we looked at the “Break Into 2”, the transition between the beginning of a story: The “Before” picture of the Protagonist and their world, and the “Upside Down World” of Act 2.

So, a little later in your average story will come the “Break Into 3”. This leaves ...

Photo: “HawkandFloAdventures Twistverse Has Official Discord”. HawkandFloAdventures creator of Hawk and Flo Adventures.

HawkandFloAdventures writes:

“Hi! 

I've just made an official discord server for my comics!



Twistverse Discord: https://discord.gg/FXCh92J9


Twistverse Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/FXCh92J9


I'm still new to it all and figuring ...

always someone breakinnn' into twooooo…

AN important part of a story is the good old “Break into Act 2”.

It's not the easiest story structure moment to recognize, but it's one of the early ones I thought about and tried to notice in movies I watched.

Many people ...

LISTEN on our player!
Or TuneinRadio - https://tunein.com/podcasts/Books–Literature/Drunkduck-Quackcast-p1150194/

A standard thing in stories is to have multiple plot lines. In short stories or when you're just starting out as a writer you tend to have a single line, the A plot, but as soon ...

a couple of three-panel archie newspaper strips.

When I was a kid in Canada, we had “Saturday Funnies” in the newspaper. These were full pages (if memory serves, it was maybe 2-4 pages) of full color cartoons. You had your Beetle Bailey, your Family Circus, your Andy Capp, your Marmaduke ...

Greetings! I hope you've all had an enjoyable holiday season so far, no matter what you're celebrating and regardless of actual ‘holidays’ are part of it for you.

The end of the year is still about a week away, but this will be my last regular Newspost of ...