With the Thanksgiving holiday coming to a close and Christmas not being far away, now is a good time to take a step back and consider the past year. For my writing partner and I, we had high hopes for the year coupled with a mountain of plans. However, those ...

It so happens that as I write these lines, I have a terrible headache. So I can't gather my thoughts enough for the third installment of my discussion of motivations and ideologies and actions, but I think I'm good to write what I'd promised- my review of ...

A flashback is when the story is interrupted or placed on hold to present an event that occurred prior to the events of the narrative. They are used to explain a character’s history with another character or explore a particular relationship with a place and/or object. Using a ...

Nowhere to Hyde

Last time we talked about characters who are not what they seem. Folks who are introduced one way but are revealed to have a secret nature, or hidden depths, or a hidden agenda.

Another type of “hidden side” I enjoy is a little less universal, but can ...

Last time we talked about motivation in people, and its relationship to behavior. And I must say you all had great comments I feel deserve to be addressed, so instead of a four-part tour to the world of what makes people tick, I will add a fifth part where I ...

Screencap taken from video referenced below.

There’s been some controversy going around about tracing vs referencing and it gave me pause for thought. And, of course, after some time, I thought it would be an interesting topic to talk about for this week.

In comics, particularly when it comes ...

Erin and Capitan Deakins are working for the state, their current mission is to bring in an escaped historian, Simon Mandel, who's working on Project 5… if they don't find him alive they have to return his dead body. The wilderness outside the citadel walls on Jupiter's ...

As any psychologist will tell you, no matter how it is explained, motivation is key.

There is no behavior that lacks motivation- a reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way.

Even our most subconscious actions have motivations, from tics to small morning rituals.

The thing that ...

When someone says they “ship” two characters they are referring to their desire to see two characters achieve a romantic relationship. The origin of the term is difficult to determine given the every fluctuating nature of Internet memes and colloquialisms, though TV Tropes has some interesting theories on where the ...

Who's it for?

In writing instructional books, there used to be this bit about deciding who your story/screenplay/series is FOR. This is a notion used in the industry (so I've read) to figure out who the audience is going to be for a given project. In ...