The demand for electric outlets in my room is high because there is always a tablet, mp3 player, or any random lithium-powered gadget lying around that needs charging. My desktop workstation drains the most energy and there is a tangled sea of snake-like cords lurking under my desk around my ...

Summer here is hot and dry, but it's so short that sometimes it feels more like a coffee break in an endless winter than a real season. People who live in the prairies know that each summer day has to be savoured - tucked away as a little memory for ...

Here are some thoughts on writing that smallest unit of a story: the scene.


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

It's Change.

Something changes between the beginning and end of a scene.

Here's a way to write one if you're stuck. These are the ...

Summary:
Come and join the carnival of spirits, darkness, twilight, magic and weirdness… Rizmo is a devilish, demonic, clownish creature with a surreal world living inside his head. Young Abbey is new in town and doesn't know anyone, but then she meets the crazy carnie who gives her a ...

LISTEN!

You always do a bit of world building in fiction, in some types of stories like alternative histories, fantasy and Sci-Fi you have to do a bit more, in things set in the real world you don't have to do nearly as much - maybe only limited to a ...

It seems that I get into a very opinionated argument whenever the topic of discussion veers toward Neon Genesis Evangelion. Usually it is about how the Evangelion movies are awesome and how the main character is not so awesome. That being said, it has been twenty years since the mid-1990s ...

Is there a word for these?

I’m talking about those things that you automatically start drawing when you have a piece of paper and no specific ideas in mind. The images that find their way into the margins of your notebooks, onto napkins in restaurants…or on a whiteboard ...

I'm not sure who the first fictional character was that I became attached to. The Cat in the Hat? Superman? Jason Voorhees, maybe?

In any case, Jughead Jones was somewhere in that early group of beloved characters. I liked Archie, and envied his dating life with Betty and Veronica ...

Why, hello there, old chap. I say, I was just about to put the kettle on. Would you care for a spot of tea? How about a beautifully crafted Talbert Pipe?

In a world set up like the murder mystery board game, Clue, a pair of fine gentlemen dressed to ...

LISTEN!

We've talked about formulas before, but mostly in the context of escaping formulas and reinventing them.
NOW however we're talking about using existing formulas to create a story, or creating new formulas and sticking to them to come up with your stories.
Formulas can be a good ...