Everyone loves a genius! The character that has the answers, or makes the deductions, or solves the puzzles for the team. The guy (or gal) that will have a gift for noticing what nobody else does, sees the connections that elude everyone else. Even in stories that aren't of ...

Last week, I went into the basics of building your fictional worlds. We’re continuing on with our second instalment where we’ll dive a bit deeper into the nitty gritty of world building. Without further ado…

What’s your world’s system of government?
Politics plays a large role ...

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What happens to characters after the big action scene or climactic moment? This could be anywhere in the story but it's usually close to the end ...

The suspension of disbelief happens automatically in readers and audiences if a story does its job.

Audiences WANT to believe in a story when they start reading or watching it.

I mean, you can' t count on everyone. I remember going to see the Benjamin Button movie and my friend ...

The word for ‘porn’ in Greek is unsurprisingly ‘porn’. But its vernacular synonym is a word that in reality means ‘tack-on’ or ‘added scrap’. It signifies the common (or at least until recently common) assumption that scenes with explicit sexual activity were there to pad the runtime for a movie ...

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Continuing on our focus on movie franchises for the month of October, THIS time we focus on the king of them all: STAR WARS!

This was a ...

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 ...

I Was Wrong - The Character Arc

Last time I was here I talked about “The Old Warrior”. It's one of my favorite character types and story elements.

This time I'm going to go into another trope/theme that almost always works for me: The realization of a character ...

So I watched Hacksaw Ridge the other day (okay it was yesterday) and it was impressive.

Not so much as a movie (though that was quite decent) but the story. The story was amazing.

It's about a man named Desmond Doss who enlists in the army during WWII to ...

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Betrayal is an interesting thing to use in fiction. You can have betrayal of your nation, your organisation, friends, lovers, religion, beliefs, self. In stories it can ...