Stuck in the Middle - Midpoints

I've often found the Midpoint of a story difficult to find and difficult to write.
It's one of the big three pillars in story structure, and it's the
most subtle.

The Midpoint doesn't have the “dragged into a new world” of ...

With Valentine's day just behind us and a lot of talk of love, I thought I'd take a look on the exact opposite of love and affection- how do we write and display hatred in characters? How do characters hate, and what's the difference from rage?

In ...

The first thing you need to know before we get into this discussion is the following: You can't copyright a style. It's true! Copyright protects an artist's expression of an idea, but not the ideas themselves, the technique, or procedure in making that style. Keep that in ...

Stereotypes permeate our every day lives. Whether we like it or not, our brains are wired for making quick estimations and judgments based on patterns and pattern recognition.

This very pattern we're looking for to identify at a glance is what a stereotype is. And it's very useful ...

It is Orthodox Easter Week, and currently it's Resurrection Saturday, easily the most important day in the Greek Orthodox year. In Greece there are a ton of customs and festivities that have been taking place all through the Holy Week, culminating to today and tomorrow, Easter Sunday. One can ...

Have you noticed that it’s very rarely that in a webcomic (or any narrative work) there’s a category of tasks or activities that people do very often in real life, but extremely rarely in stories?

Watching TV, being on the computer (when NOT being a hacker or doing ...

One of the most prevalent motifs in fantasy, science fiction/ space operas and similar folklore style genres is that of the Chosen One- the one character (99% the main character/protagonist) that is destined to save the world from the big bad- the evil sorcerer, the overlord, the empire, the ...

One reason why the movie Psycho is so iconic is, aside the expert directing and artistic cinematography, the fact that the one we’re led to believe is the main character of the movie gets brutally killed in the shower quite early into the movie.

What did killing her off ...

Kids these days have some sort of idea that it is cool to be an introvert, they wear the title like some sort of badge of pride. Some young people claim to be introverted because they stay indoors all day and spend a lot of time on the internet watching ...

A pet is wonderful to have in your life- they will usually love you unconditionally and give you moments of solace with their antics. They become a member of the family, they have personalities that make them unique across all other pets you will ever have and across species. You ...