So, last week we talked about theme, and how it is generally expressed through the Protagonist in a given story, as they struggle through whatever type of conflict is appropriate to that tale. We had a few common examples of themes:

-Love conquers all

-The strongest or most determined will ...

The plot is the spine of your story, the scaffolding upon which everything will be placed in order to create a full experience for the audience to immerse themselves in- be it a movie or a comic or a novel.

Just like the spine, however, there is a limit to ...

Given that it was Valentine's Day yesterday, and that is associated with a lot of special moments between couples, I thought we could talk about the Day After! What do you do on the Day After? Do you run to buy a pill or do you roll over and ...

The suspension of disbelief happens automatically in readers and audiences if a story does its job.

Audiences WANT to believe in a story when they start reading or watching it.

I mean, you can' t count on everyone. I remember going to see the Benjamin Button movie and my friend ...

Rules are meant to be bent, or broken.

Of course they are- if it's a one time thing. If it happens all the time, the stakes collapse, the story comes apart, and the experience is ruined. I'm talking about stories, of course…

As we've talked about time ...

Wise men are like valuable spice for a story. They are also a wonderful plot device, or an extremely cheesy one, depending on how the character is used and written.

Wise men (and women) are often the moral compass to the main characters, or hold some kind of answer to ...

A few Newsposts from our contributors have mentioned plotting or planning vs the pantsing or ‘discovery’ approach to writing.

Plotting, which is obviously building some kind of plan or outline, is an approach many writers swear by, at least to some degree. It might be a vague plan, with a ...

MacGuffin comin' through!


MacGuffins

I'm not sure if everyone knows this already, but a MacGuffin is a term that was made popular by Alfred Hitchcock, and is now widely used in writing and storytelling circles.

It is an item or event (or possibly even a character) that exists only ...

So the third and final installment in the new Disney Star Wars trilogy is out. Personally, I haven't seen it yet, mainly because the mild curiosity I have can wait until the movie hits the streaming services.

Initially, it seemed like this final installment would be met with average ...

The word for ‘porn’ in Greek is unsurprisingly ‘porn’. But its vernacular synonym is a word that in reality means ‘tack-on’ or ‘added scrap’. It signifies the common (or at least until recently common) assumption that scenes with explicit sexual activity were there to pad the runtime for a movie ...