I'm not sure who the first fictional character was that I became attached to. The Cat in the Hat? Superman or Batman? Animal from the Muppets? Oscar the Grouch?

In any case, Jughead Jones was somewhere in that very early group of beloved characters. I liked Archie, and envied ...

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 ...

Greetings, citizens!

Superpowers coming from magical abilities or fantastic technology are essential to many stories in the fantasy and science fiction genres. They can show up in other genres, too, like horror and of course, superhero stories (are they science fiction stories? Science-Fantasy? Heroic Fantasy? Whatever - most of those folks ...

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 ...

I like mentor characters.

This is not just me of course; the mentor and protagonist relationship is powerful. Some of the best moments in many stories are the first encounter with the mentor, the training and sense of discovery for the protagonist, and the eventual loss of the mentor character ...

Reflection Characters

When I was doing a little reading on the “Mentor” character type, I learned about something called “Reflection Characters”. It was an eye opener; I'd never heard of this before, though I could instantly see how it made sense in storytelling, and dozens of examples came to ...

As another year draws to a close, I'm once again thinking about how much time is flying by, more and more quickly the older I get.

Weeks whiz by like mad these days, and how quickly we've reached the end of the year reminds me that YEARS are ...

Obviously, comics don't have sound. And that includes most webcomics.

But if you want to show music playing, or being performed, how do you indicate it on a comic page?

The first method that comes to mind is just writing the lyrics in a dialogue balloon, and maybe peppering ...

Peter Quill is an earthling living and working in space

In an interview about SNL creatives, it was said that actors who write prefer Strange characters in a normal world. While writers will write pieces about Regular people in a bizarre world. I have no idea how true that is ...

City Mouse and Country Mouse


In an Aesop's Fable, the Country Mouse offers a big-city Mouse a simple meal, which the City Mouse scoffs at. The two go to the big city for a much more fancy repast, and then are chased by a cat, whereupon the Country Mouse ...