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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 ...

I was watching the 2015 series of Poldark the other day and I noticed something strange;
None of the characters have the moral grey areas and twists that we expect of characters in modern stories, where they behave one way but it turns out they were thinking the opposite all ...

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 ...

Reading Fun Streak is about as fun as running buck-naked across a football field during a half-time show. The comic strips vary between stand alone jokes that last a page to actual drawings made on the DrawQuest app. This comic has jokes that are inspired by pop culture references, modern ...

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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 ...

Above: Final Fantasy IX (2000) by Squaresoft. Below: Final Fantasy XIII (2010) by SquareEnix.

One of the main influences of my art style comes from the Final Fantasy video games of the late 1990s and early 2000s. I remembered being mesmerized by the full orchestrated score by Nobuo Uematsu, I ...

Feedback from your audience has always been important- from the renaissance palace parlors to enlightenment salons to the modern art galleries, how much the audience is pleased by what the creator procures is central.

But in the age of the internet and webcomics, where comics are updated page by page ...

This is mainly an issue with female characters…
But what IS objectification?
Objectification is when you rob a character of traits that make them human and turn them into something closer to an object.

One common view, that I feel is in error, is that characters are objectified by how ...

One of the greatest comic book stories ever written, by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby are known as the main architects of the Marvel Universe. But there was a third originator of that landmark creation:

Steve Ditko was an artist who originally worked as a ...