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How about having it so anyone in your story can die?
Let me explain: It's fake. NOT just anyone can die OK? Your main character will ...

In a story when any character is plausibly eligible to die, the stakes are high. We worry for everyone, even main characters than in other stories wouldn't be on the chopping board at all. It's a great premise to have for your story setup, because it makes the ...

When my writing partner and I were penning the beginnings of issue 0 of The Constellation Chronicle we designed two characters Marcel and Wainwright. We wanted to introduce the looming threat that was barreling towards the main cast and the most convenient way to do that was through these two ...

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Cooperation Vs Competition. For decades the mantra was competition is good: it produces progress and makes things better… Well that's actually false. Competition is what you ...

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Today we compare and contrast two ways of making characters: starting with a pure archetype and building it with tropes, or creating a character organically through circumstance ...

So, full disclosure: I am spoiler immune.

I don't really care if I know how a story ends, or where the twist is. I might even enjoy it more as I anticipate it. I will watch the movie without issue and still enjoy it just as much.

Granted, when ...

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Tantz's clever idea was that the weather isn't just a backdrop… it's an important prop in it's own right.
Weather can be used ...

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Sometimes your audience just doesn't pick up on the clever symbolism, the hints, the metaphor, the underlying themes and all the artistic cleverness in writing and ...

Time travel is a narrative trap. It's quicksand.

It's very alluring to use, being able to put a person from one historical era into another and watch as shenanigans ensue, but very quickly, a writer (and often the audience too) discovers that it quickly unravels, and the story ...

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Today we cover the interesting trope of the “old warrior”. This was based upon a newspost Banes came up with last week. He was thinking of Captain ...