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My original idea for this Quackcast was: “Genre fiction is the best place to explore ideas, straight fiction doesn't do it as well”
What I meant ...

Writing what you know is one of those old canards that show up in writing advice, though it's not up there with things like “show, don't tell” and “this is supposed to be a literary essay - do not doodle in the margins”.

Or is that last one just ...

There are the mustache-twirling villains, that enjoy being evil. They're deliciously fun!

Then there are the nutjob villains. Those that are basket cases one way or the other, psychopaths or antisocial, unfettered madmen with a logic of their own that wreaks havoc upon the world. They're also very ...

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 ...

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 ...

Usually in adventures, thrillers and other stories, when the main characters are romantically involved, the B plot (or even the A plot) is the ‘will they/won’t they' question: will they get together in the end, usually with a happy end scene of marriage, or some such thing. Romance ...

classic tale of cause and effect!

Our very own Pickle-Face made a forum topic on the Duck, asking people to create a basic ‘cause and effect’ statement on their comic.

The structure goes something like this: Say what happens, and then what the effect is in the story. This is ...

Baneset Jones' Diary


We Three: Love Triangles

On the ‘terrible writing advice’ youtube channel, one of the running jokes is the over-reliance and overemphasis on love triangles in bad fiction.

Are they automatically bad, though?

They can be. If a character's main problem, regardless of genre, is having to ...

It's all fine and exciting when using lore and myth to create new stories. Especially when it comes to modern genres like urban fantasy, it can yield pretty alluring and impressive results! From ancient Greek mythology to all kinds of Asian myths and legends, to Norse mythology and Egyptian ...

When an uninvited call girl’s attempt to make easy money is foiled because of a sleeping client, a large scale sting operation planned by the police is also derailed. Brothels, sterile hospitals, and a time set three-hundred years in the future make this the perfect backdrop for Superintendent Inspector ...