In today's fast-paced world, you need to immediately catch an audience's attention with your story, your movie, your webcomic or your graphic novel. You get two lines in a text, a page or two in a comic, 20-30 seconds to a minute for a movie or a series ...

The first week of award winners have been announced. Niccea would also like to remind everyone that she will be accepting awards extras through the end of the month. Extras are usually acceptance/ concession speeches or other behind the scenes fun.

Send extras to Niccea here:
http://www.theduckwebcomics.com ...

One of the toughest tropes in any kind of narrative work, from novels to comics to movies is the Sacrificial Lion - but not for what might be an obvious reason: having to axe a top tier character. It's because the trope is something that will affect and carry through ...

Every hero goes up against a villain. Every protagonist against an antagonist. This is the main clash that drives your story, any story, forward be it slice of life or epic drama.

One of the elements that can make this driving force compelling, that will make the clash interesting and ...

If you have checked out the Drunk Duck Award Forum thread that is being moderated by Niccea, then you would have seen the list of award categories posted. This is a useful list if you want to see if your comic qualifies for any of the categories before creating a ...

One of the most prevalent motifs in fantasy, science fiction/ space operas and similar folklore style genres is that of the Chosen One- the one character (99% the main character/protagonist) that is destined to save the world from the big bad- the evil sorcerer, the overlord, the empire, the ...

One reason why the movie Psycho is so iconic is, aside the expert directing and artistic cinematography, the fact that the one we’re led to believe is the main character of the movie gets brutally killed in the shower quite early into the movie.

What did killing her off ...

In stories there are always protagonists and antagonists. And sometimes it’s the protagonists that are more interesting while others it’s the antagonists that steal the scene. Very rarely, it is both.

In all the wide versatility and range between characters, what is the common feature of interesting, memorable ...

Amnesia is a very frequently used plot device in narrative works, especially in genres like romance or mystery or melodrama. It’s a perfect way to achieve either of the following (or all):
(a) Draw out a story that should have wrapped up already
(b) Reuse a character’s ‘naïve ...

Reflection Characters

When I was doing a little reading on the “Mentor” character type, I learned about something called “Reflection Characters”. It was an eye opener; I'd never heard of this before, though I could instantly see how it made sense in storytelling, and dozens of examples came to ...