The funny thing about time is that it only goes in one direction and it goes faster and faster as you age. What at first seems like a broad, deep, slowly meandering river becomes a narrow, fast flowing, gushing torrent the older you get: there's just never enough time ...

Emotional Charges and Diminishing Returns

Many writing methodologies suggest mapping out the emotional change of each scene. The scene either starts positive, and goes to either negative or “extra positive”, or starts negative and goes to positive or “extra negative” by the end of the scene.

So if a lovelorn ...

SINGLE PAGES vs. The GREATER WHOLE

I'm at a nice place in my webcomic right now. Well, it's nice as the writer, at least.
The characters have a nice history now, with some adventures behind them, some established relationships, and a stable of supporting characters who can be ...

Comedic Characters - You Take the Good, you Take the Bad…

This week we continue talking comedy. Last time we started creating characters by choosing a “STRONG COMIC PERSPECTIVE”…like greed, innocence, obseque–obquestri–obteq– uh, weasellishness, and then EXAGGERATING that perspective to the extreme.

Now we finish creating our characters ...

Last week I looked at a theory of the “comedy premise” that has to do with crossing the mundane with the unusual.

Here's that post:

http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2017/apr/12/comedy-part-one-the-premise/

This week: Creating Comedic Characters!

Using the same principle as the “premise” creation, we can ...

LISTEN!

Chekhov's gun is the principal (as I understand it), that if you have some item, fact or piece of information introduced into your story that you draw specific attention to, then you'd better use it some how later on in your story. The simplest example is a ...

Emotional Charges and Diminishing Returns

Many writing methodologies suggest mapping out the emotional change of each scene. The scene either starts positive, and goes to either negative or “extra positive”, or starts negative and goes to positive or “extra negative” by the end of the scene.

So if a lovelorn ...

METAPHORROR

Hey, they're always tellin' me to recycle!

Last Halloween I did a breakdown of four categories of horror. So I've repurposed it here, images and all, to talk about the metaphorical nature of horror.

Horror is perfect for metaphor and allegory. In fact, a horror story is ...

There are quite a few interesting little projects going on right now! I thought it would be nice to showcase some of them in case people are interested in getting involved. Community projects are a great way to play around with your characters, get creative with writing and drawing, and ...

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince (2015)

When I was very young, my mom had placed a series of book collections on the headboard of my bed before I learned how to read or developed any interest in books. Among the titles, nestled between C.S. Lewis' Narnia series ...