Normally in stories there is the hero vs the villain or the protagonist vs the antagonist. As the audience, we generally expect to root for the hero or the protagonist and hope for the villain's or antagonist's comeuppance.

But there come those times when we find ourselves rooting ...

Last week I wrote about what you can do when you make mistakes in the artwork of your webcomic. A mistake in the writing is oftentimes harder to fix than the artwork. Foreshadowing and building of the world’s foundations is baked into what you write, so when you finally ...

Exposition is information that the author wants the reader to know before they move on in the plot. It is delivered in one chunk, in the form of a conversation, a diary or an explanation from the view of the narrator. Despite its bad reputation, there is a place for ...

Usually when building a character, we go for their general personality in terms of traits, the routine/general behavior they would display, the routine/general things that would interest them and so on.

If you are writing a slice of life story, or a sitcom style series, or anything that ...

The witch is different than a sorceress, though their affinity with magic and their powers often can overlap: the sorceress carries status; the witch carries fear.

It's not that the sorceress is not potentially feared or the witch is not potentially respected- it's that the core of their ...

The Holy Man or Woman may be within the clergy, but that isn't necessarily the case.

They are simply the person that has found enlightenment, or self actualization, depending on how secular your story (and your approach) is.

They are the character that doesn't have all the answers ...

There are many tropes and many archetypes that we use for character designs. I had a couple of years go (have I really been at it this long!?) done a series of articles on the standard character type/functionality archetypes.

I'm thinking it's high time to explore archetypes ...

There's nothing more entertaining than the angst of a monster that was once a human being. A monster that hates who he/she is, that strives to regain all the terrible loss he/she has sustained, to strive to become human again.



Or if it starts off a monster ...

There is a reason why in fanfiction archives there's a whole category of stories called “hurt/comfort”, where one of the main characters of a specific IP is injured, and others (usually an unlikely person or whoever the author is shipping with the injured one) have to take care ...

Whether we have free will or not is a philosophical, existential and psychological conundrum that will forever tease and challenge us. While I can't speak for philosophers, I can for psychologists:

Behaviorists will tell you it doesn't exist (look up Skinner); Cognitive behaviorists will tell you it's ...