Any creative person knows that the hardest thing can be to find an audience for your work. On one side of the great divide we have the creatives (the writers, artists, fashion designers, architects, musicians, dancers etc), and on the other we have the consumers. Those consumers have a voracious ...

I've talked about villains before and how they can be very nuanced in their motivations (without those motivations being redeeming) but today, thanks to Emma Clare's Friday post, I became inspired to talk about abject, absolute, abominable villainy! The twirling mustache type, the one that is so pure ...

One of the best types of villains are those that you love to hate. Despite how much you would love for them to shuffle off the mortal coil, they continue to captivate you with their malice and determination and you know that when they do leave the plot, whether deserved ...

image by Ben Burgraff

When writing a historical fiction, it's very likely that you will need to include some actual historical personalities along with your historically-adept yet fictional cast.

Depicting a historical character is hard enough when there's a general consensus among historians and popular belief about who ...

Building a platonic friendship has its challenges, not only because as an author or creator of your webcomic you will need to handle the audience's propensity to assume your male and female lead will be romantically involved, but because of the demands you'll need to meet to make ...

What is a character? A miserable little pile of traits! Except no, there is more to a character than a collection of likes and dislikes. There are varying opinions on the importance of character versus plot, with some authors viewing all characters as a mere tool to drive plot forward ...

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We mined Tantz's Saturday newspost for our discussion topic: Strong characters and how to write GOOD ones!
What is a strong character? Well ...

Inspiration strikes! A new idea forms, and you're really excited about it. You want to take your time, however– you want this to be great, and no great thing just springs fully formed from one's brow. For years you toil, tweak, refine, moving ever closer to the point ...

A ton of things have been written about “strong female characters”- how we need them in narratives, and what it means to have them in a creative work's cast. Tons of discussions and social media wars have been waged on what it is that makes a female character strong ...

Stereotypes permeate our every day lives. Whether we like it or not, our brains are wired for making quick estimations and judgments based on patterns and pattern recognition.

This very pattern we're looking for to identify at a glance is what a stereotype is. And it's very useful ...