A character will stay stuck in their ways if they can, just like a real person tends to. It takes effort to move forward and achieve things. And we resist.

In the beginning of a story, a character might feel comfortable where they are, but they are usually incomplete in ...

Used Books is celebrating its tenth anniversary on Feb. 23 (Thursday), so we are interrupting the story for a couple special extras this week. The first is posted Monday.

usedbooks writes:

The Beginning

Thursday, February 23rd marks the 10th anniversary of Used Books online. I started drawing UB shortly after ...

Welcome back, gang! Er, can I call y'all “gang”? Is that too informal or too assumptive about your willingness for complicity in my extra curricular activities? Eh, too bad. Once you're in the gang, there's only one way out. Now, while you're letting that sink in ...

Huh. You're still here? I'll be damned.

Well then. Let's just go ahead and pick up where we left off last week, which if I recollect, was the beginning. Or at least, that's where you stepped into my world. Now, how you think about beginnings has ...

I was actually asked some writing questions the other day. Who the deuce would ask ME for advice? But I happened to have a little.


Here are some thoughts on writing that smallest unit of a story: the scene (reprise):


First off, what is a scene? What defines it?

It ...

Every good story (true, fabricated, or more typically, somewhere in between) here in the City That Forgot to Care, begins with a thoughtful pause, a drawn out “Well,” followed by the phrase “what had happened was…”

“Who drank my beer?”
“Dude, what happened to your face?”
“Why are you carrying ...

A little comic by Vasya Lozhkin: “I will take revenge”

Earlier today I was reading this article about an immigrant to Canada who learned English with the help of comics, and who now creates comics himself. It got me to thinking about what a great resource comics are for learning ...

Each time I return from shopping with a bag full of a pile of board games, vinyl action figures, or video games, I feel like I fit into a demographic of adults that still collect toys. I have a small amount of bills, so the money I earn gets to ...

I was hanging out with my family over the holidays, explaining that I wasn't sad or sick, but had been rubbing my eye because there was some dust or a hair or something stuck behind the eyeball. It was quite uncomfortable.

As I remembered how tears can flush out ...

To me this is one of the most fascinating elements of storytelling. The idea behind Chekhov’s Gun is to employ parsimony in the information comprising a plot and content: If something isn’t essential to the story, just don’t include it. Little by little, it became more “if ...