How to Pick, Research and Implement Mental Disorder in a Character

So last time I talked in general about some basic concepts and principles about what constitutes mental illness, or, more accurately, mental disorder. The important thing to remember and keep from all of that is this set of truths ...

A few months ago, I was linked to a video about original thinkers by organisational psychologist, Adam Grant. and the habits of people he calls originals. It’s a very interesting video and I highly recommend watching it, but one of the points that he makes is about embracing the ...

Writing a character with mental illness can be a very tricky thing. Writers usually go for the extremely rare, exotic and spectacular: multiple personality disorders, extreme manifestations of psychopathy or sociopathy, high functioning autism with that ever alluring ‘savant’ magic going for the character, bombastically spectacular schizophrenia… in many ways ...

In a nutshell, exposition is a big ole mound of information that the author wants the reader to know before they move on in the plot. It often gets a bad rap but that is usually due to it being used incorrectly. There is definitely a place for exposition so ...

I'm not sure how many creators do it, but I often place my original characters in different settings, writing out stories about them very much like I'd write fanfiction about some established franchise.

It's even more fun when I do it mixing them up with characters from ...

It's almost 2019!

Yes yes, I've already made an article about the year ending, but what about the one starting?

Among the singing and the partying, we also tend to make resolutions about how we'll do better in the coming year: we'll diet, we'll make ...

As we are well into holiday season and only 9 days before 2019 (the final countdown!), I think it's good to have a look at all the awesome stuff that happened at the DD site, all absolutely done, funded, supported and cultivated by webcomic artists for webcomic artists AND ...

Last weekend we discussed that strange phenomenon of independent creation, where there's more than a passing resemblance to another work but it's not a case of plagiarism. Interestingly, not long after I posted that I saw not one but two instances of independent creation being brought up (though ...

Tumblr made its name years ago as a great place to post images. It was always a kind of photo album journal site. Unlike Facebook and other places that were more about text, Tumblr did a really good job with pictures. Other sites have since moved into that territory but ...

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 ...