Critics, professional or not, identified a trend in many of the…lesser regarded manga and anime series.
It's the “everyman hero”.

This school of thought is that to make a lead character who is identifiable to everyone in the readership or audience. So the lead will be unremarkable, and ...

Often when there are children in a cast of characters, especially in sitcoms or certain types of movies, audiences groan because they tend to be immensely annoying. They are a very special type of uncanny valley in the way they are written to talk and react. Usually, we get one ...

So maybe the verb ‘hate’ is excessive, but there are some tropes that can really throw me off a story. Or perhaps, what throws me is the way they are used. I firmly believe that any trope can be part of a solid, enjoyable story, even the ones I hate ...

Designing memorable characters doesn’t just stop at their appearance. The manner in which they speak and use body language is integral to building a full picture of who they are as a character as well as how others react to them. Here are some tips on how to make ...

The Bestest Evar: Revisiting Mary Sues -
And a Contest!

Way back in the day our friend and my grizzled old mentor HippieVan did a post discussing Mary Sues - and we followed it up with a Mary Sue “contest”.

Many of us comic creator and reader types have probably known the ...

the cruel tutor himself, Pai Mei

One of my favorite character types is the gruff/grizzled old mentor. Tough as nails, mean or cranky on the outside but with great knowledge or support to offer when you know them, or when they know - and trust - you.

I've talked about ...

Silent types can be very alluring. They don't really engage with other people, they are content to be on their own, they have developed their own special, unique manner of wading through life independently, which makes them interesting. They are their own kind of strong, even if they are ...

We've all been told how in story telling, showing is a lot better than telling.

Showing gets hard if your main character is a loner that interacts with nobody. Even harder if he/she is a stoic that emotes very little. The audience will have no way of knowing ...

Might as well get it out of the way: if you're a mentor in a story, chances are you're going on a boatride over the river Styx at some point.

When a mentor dies it's often the signal that the main character, the one being mentored, is ...

I've talked many times about story structure. Even with a structural approach, there are a lot of questions to be answered, struggles to be had, and hard thinking to be done to make a story work.

One big moment that I like thinking about early in the writing is ...