When I began working from home, it became clear very early on that my current work area needed a serious upgrade. My desk was surrounded by old letters, books and junk, I had piles of clothes on the floor, I kept knicking my partner’s chair because mine had begun ...

Last week we talked about “writing what you know” … but how about ‘knowing what you write’? I knew I wanted to do this one as soon as I posted the previous article…just for the title.

In a TV show, series of books, movie, printed comic series, or newspaper strip ...

An ancient old woman shambles up to a even older tree that stands alone and isolated on a bare green hill. She makes a request of it, undergoes an intense magical ritual and examines the the detritus and trinkets she's collected over the course of her life… What is ...

We grin and support John Wick as he ploughs through dozens of people per minute in his revenge quest over his murdered dog and ruined car, but we gasp with shock when the Wicked Witch of the East pursues a single person to take revenge for killing her sister with ...

In my early days as a junior designer. I had the good fortune to work under a talented graphic designer and I remember looking at her work thinking, “Oh wow! She’s so clever!” She saw me struggling with a piece of artwork one day. Leaning over, her voice conspiratorially ...

I've talked many times about story structure. Even with a structural approach, there are a lot of questions to be answered, struggles to be had, and hard thinking to be done to make a story work.

One big moment that I like thinking about early in the writing is ...

Miriam and Karim make a pretty hot team. Miriam is a cyborg built for battle with the latest in military tech, Karim is a powerfully built man and a clever scientist to boot. The year is 2073 and the world isn't a safe place (is it ever?), high tech ...

As a sector of the working world scrambles to see how they can move a typical work day to a computer screen, observing a population of people stumbling to transition to face-to-face video conferencing apps like Zoom has been like watching the first ten seconds of an infomercial—the transition ...

When Sierra, a fashionable young girl, visits her grandmother’s home in the idyllic, fairy tale cottage in the woods, life looks like it is more comfortable. She heads over to town for groceries and to visit Lacy at the local bar when she discovers Lacy has snagged a slot ...

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Certain tropes or stylistic ways of telling a story can get really, really popular and trendy very quickly and it seems like they're everywhere! Suddenly many ...