Character Motivation

One thing I appreciate in well written stories is the hidden motivations of characters. Well written characters, just like real people, have contradictions to them. Desires and needs that are sometimes in conflict with each other.

Story structure tells us that a character has to WANT something. The ...

As a compulsive - and rather obsessive – writer I often find myself tinkering around with language. And I’ve always found the creativity and imagination that can go into the language within a fictional world to be similar to that of an illustrator. When done well it can bring color and ...

Hello and welcome to Panel by Panel, an analysis of panels from comics right here on The Duck and exploring what they do, how they work, and what we can learn from them.

Let's start with our panel in question this week. This one comes from the webcomic of ...

I’m taking a pause from the Fantastic Bestiary this week as I haven’t been my best healthwise lately. Also lately I’ve been distracted by something that has left me with this question poppin’ into my mind, And so this sunday I'm posting this question that perhaps ...

No, this article isn't about the mythological beings. I wouldn't want to steal any single one from Andreas Helixfinger's awesome Sunday article series.

What I want to talk about is the metaphorical unicorn: a character that is too good to be true, too unlikely to be found ...

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The full team is assembled yet again! Tantz came up with the idea of having a look at hidden fantasy worlds in fiction that have strong ties ...

As Easter has come by to melt away the final vestiges of a long, cold winter (at least up in these parts where I live) it feels like a good time to bring up the mythology of witches. Witches have a central role in the Easter that we celebrate here ...

Our world seems drab, grey, mundane. But some escape it through a magic portal that transports them into a colorful, beautiful, adventurous magic world.

A world that is secret, known only to the select few as everyone else lives on unaware in the real world. And yet, the secret magic ...

Last week’s post of the Fantastic Bestiary dealt with housespirits of ancient Rome. In this post we’re going to the far east, following up on another suggestion left by DD member marcorossi. We are going to study the Naga today. The Nagas are a race of serpentine beings ...

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BANES RETURNS! …to talk about boobs with the rest of us. The topic of the discussion this week was brought to us by Tantz's newspost on ...