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What rights are people actually entitled to? That question is a lot bigger than you think!
The Quackcast today is sequel to last week's about entitled ...

Conflict!

It's the essential building block of drama. You don't have a story without the basics of “someone wants something, and something's in the way of getting it.”

Screenwriting books - books I really love and have given me a lot - will often say that amping up the ...

I'm a big fan of story structure. It can be a big help to figuring out how to put a story together in a way that works. Not that structure needs to be followed in a slavish way, or that one structure applies to every story.
But it can ...

A conflicted young man takes a drastic step from which there's normally no turning back from…
Fortunately he gets a second chance. This is the story about a man's journey after a serious life changing event. Will he redeem and recover or spiral back into the same abyss ...

Photo: “The Uncanny X-Men Issue #319, Untapped Potential: Bobby Drake and Rogue Talk About Sand Castles“. Marvel Comics. (December 1995)

Saturday morning was spent mall trotting like a typical nineties mall rat. The mall was like a ghost town in the early hours of the day when every storefront was ...

Another pop cultural fantastic bestiary Sunday. Anybody remember the movie Avatar? Not the kung-fu fantasy one, the tribal sci-fi one. The James Cameron’s Avatar as it was marketed. I still remember it being the movie that REALLY set the standard for what CGI technology can do cinematically, making this ...

The manchild is a very comic trope in fiction over the years. It's the kind of person who is an adult physically, but have not accepted adult responsibilities in some parts of life…or maybe any part of life. They are irresponsible in relationships or work or life in ...

Historical Drama/period pieces present multiple issues for the writer/creator to deal with.

In talking about the drama in his movie “Cinderella Man”, Ron Howard said that the drama was built into the story itself. Meaning the actual true events. The moving radio broadcast where the Depression-Era boxer Jimmy ...

Character Motivation

One thing I appreciate in well written stories is the hidden motivations of characters. Well written characters, just like real people, have contradictions to them. Desires and needs that are sometimes in conflict with each other.

Story structure tells us that a character has to WANT something. The ...

Holy Unholy Alliance, Batman!

Last week we talked about what I called the “villain combo platter” with different types of villains that could make for multifaceted kinds of conflicts for the hero to face.

At the time, PaulEberhart mentioned the alliance between villains that happened at one point during Deep ...