Thursdays with Banes - The Murky Middle

A good way to put together a story is to figure out some essentials, first - Elements of Character, Plot and Theme, and Building some World and all that. We've talked about these things around here a lot, and we'll prolly continue to ...

Every building needs a skeleton in place before building begins, so that the end product will be sound. It’s no different with fantasy world building: before you begin gathering and using your story’s bricks and mortar (= the research) you need to have the world’s skeleton, or rigging ...

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 ...

LISTEN!

In this Quast we talk about immortality, which is a common trope in literature. Who seeks immortality in stories? It's usually bad guys, and it usually has some sort of extreme price,catch or dark side, so much so that people actually believe that if immortality WAS real ...

image by me

There are many ways to create a fantasy world. Sometimes you need something very elaborate and thought out in the minutest detail and sometimes you need just enough to sketch out a minimal stage for your story to work.

So the first thing to do when deciding ...

Continuing to expand my knowledge and discover comics on The Duck that I had previously let slip by me, last week I found something amazing. A comic that seems low down in the ranking of it's genre. A comic that has only 10 Likes (including me) at time of ...

art by yours truly

It is no secret that as an artist, it is prose that I’m professional at rather than painting/drawing. And historical fiction aside, what I’m told I write quite well is fantasy. So, for a long time I have wanted to talk about writing ...

Every week I do a newspost about “this week's Quackcast”, but what IS that?
Well, it's pretty simple: it's the official Drunk Duck podcast!
We've been recording these every week (pretty much) since 2010! We talk about the site, drawing, comicing, story and writing techniques, pop-culture ...

Every comic needs to be researched. Except maybe an autobiographical one, since it’s most likely you already have a thorough knowledge of what is going on in your life.

Or maybe you don’t, and this is your Cognitive Therapy homework.

In any case, a few exceptions aside, just ...

So we come to the end of this long litany of presentations on Jung’s assorted archetypes that craftsmen of the narrative arts have used since time immemorial to weave their yarns.

And what better way to end with the crowning jewel in every story, from books to movies to ...