Having discussed a general approach to writing characters with mental disorders (with a lot of thoughtful comments by you further enriching what I had to say!) it's only right that we wrap up this very quick analysis with an example of a story that properly portrays them.

I chose ...

Dialogue is a vital part of a comic, book or movie.

Well - usually it is. There are surely some comics out there who have none. There's prose, such as many children's stories or fables that are all or mostly action and description - and since the rise of sound ...

With fewer art programs in schools these days on average, the next generation of budding artists looks bright.

In elementary school, students take a piece of paper, place it on top of a personal tablet and trace an image using a technique that is similar to using an animation light ...

So it turns out I'm quite ill this week and I don't feel I have enough focus to finish up my “Writing Mental Illness” set of articles. I promise to do that next week.

For today I'd like to talk about planning, writing and drawing a webcomic ...

This is the fascinating and harrowing tale of a person discarded by society, used up, pushed to the side and forced through the cracks. You are shown life from his unique perspective and taken into his dark world, increasingly farther on the fringes of every day life. And yet he ...

Let's be honest, we don't always appreciate someone pointing out our mistakes. Criticism may be important for artists growing into their craft to find the right areas to focus on improving through a little outside guidance, but not all critique is made equal. Frankly speaking, a lot of ...

How to Pick, Research and Implement Mental Disorder in a Character

So last time I talked in general about some basic concepts and principles about what constitutes mental illness, or, more accurately, mental disorder. The important thing to remember and keep from all of that is this set of truths ...

While walking down the street in San Diego’s gas lamp quarter I pass a tattoo shop and my friend says to me, “Let’s get tattoos! I already know what I want my next design to be.” I hesitated and walked on not because of my lack of interest ...

Writing a character with mental illness can be a very tricky thing. Writers usually go for the extremely rare, exotic and spectacular: multiple personality disorders, extreme manifestations of psychopathy or sociopathy, high functioning autism with that ever alluring ‘savant’ magic going for the character, bombastically spectacular schizophrenia… in many ways ...

While talking about the Golden Globes last night, my best friend tells me to stop spoiling the end results. ‘Okay, I will stay in the crisper’, I responded. I should have known! A majority of people do not like endings of books or winners of award shows revealed before it ...