A well written protagonist will generally have some flaws, starting out as an underdog of some kind, with lessons to learn and improvements to make over the course of the story.

Granted, some heroes are, well, just heroes, who are pretty much who they need to be from the beginning ...

So as you probably know, there has been an Indiegogo campaign going to help us raise money to make our inebriated waterfowl current with the times, and more interactive for the readers, with the comment alert feature and the capacity to reply to comments feature among other things.

But before ...

(The idea of this post piggybacks on Tantz's article on Net Neutrality, which was inspired by Jillyfoo's forum thread on the same topic. Jillyfoo coined the phrase “planting the worry seeds” in the forum post in order to consider the worst possible outcome.)

I would go outside and ...

Kim Luster’s The Good Walker webcomic is what inspired me to write this newspost about dreams.
Depicting a character’s dreams in a story is a very powerful and useful tool! Especially when it comes to visual narratives, such as webcomics and movies, a dream sequence can communicate to ...

Often in making webcomics, creators may try to have more action than discourse, as it tends to make the comic more visually interesting and give opportunities to avoid ‘talking head’ scenes.

However, I think that sort of conundrum is a potential trap that might prevent creators from truly making use ...

LISTEN!

What is the best approach to make a scary story? To directly show the monster, the horror and the gore, or to hold off on that and let the audience fill in the blanks and guide them to imagine something far more awful and real than you could conceive ...

Amnesia is a very frequently used plot device in narrative works, especially in genres like romance or mystery or melodrama. It’s a perfect way to achieve either of the following (or all):
(a) Draw out a story that should have wrapped up already
(b) Reuse a character’s ‘naïve ...

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 ...

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 ...

So you have your kick ass story ready, you’ve researched your world well and feel comfortable in it, and you have an awesome set of personalities to equip your characters that will propagate your story (or complement it if the plot is story driven).

The only thing left to ...