I was actually asked some writing questions the other day. Who the deuce would ask ME for advice? But I happened to have a little.


Here are some thoughts on writing that smallest unit of a story: the scene (reprise):


First off, what is a scene? What defines it?

It ...

Happy New Year’s Eve!
Thinking about the new year that is just about to begin, I thought to talk about beginnings in stories, and especially in webcomics.

How a story begins, the very first pages of it, are key for catching the audience’s attention and keeping it. The ...

Everyone loves a good thriller, a titillating mystery, a tale full of twists and turns (that make sense), something that challenges you to find the answer before you’re given it at the final act.
I’m not sure how many like sitting down to construct them.

Don’t get ...

No matter what the genre, plot and general tone of your comic, death always is absolute.

Or alternatively, death is used as a very efficient comedy device (if anyone remembers the numerous ways Dirk dies in Dragon’s Layer). Unsurprisingly so, I think, since real comedy is based on tragedy ...

The old frenetic push to any creator to be ‘original’- especially, though not limited, in literature, in comics and the arts in general is nothing new. It pretty much is the first question anyone has when trying to assess a work of art: is it original?

Often, for the answer ...

One of the really cool things about comic making is that we have so many tools at our disposal that people who tells stories in other mediums don’t necessarily have. One of those is the ability to show a character’s inner monologue without interrupting the external narrative or ...

This newspost is inspired by ozoneocean’s recent thread and quackcast about evoking emotion. I've recently been struggling with the opposite issue in my own comic. The whole project is really just a light-hearted excuse to draw my favourite things and write odd characters, but it's also held ...

LISTEN!

Doing stories that start with the climax, then flash back, tell what happened to get there: the old narrative style of switching the first few chapters around to make a more interesting story.
Sometimes it works GREAT because it throws you right into the middle of things and you ...

Two-thousand fifteen started off with Kroatz wishing everyone in the Drunk Duck forums “growth, satisfaction, and purpose, even if it comes with an almost equal amount of suffering and loss.” I do not believe any statement made in this last year comes as close to this to sum up the ...

My love for art - and narrative art in particular - began well before I had ever laid eyes on a comic book. As a child, my parents and my grandparents worked selling books for publishers. Every few weeks we would get a big box of sample books and it would be ...