Welcome to March!

I thought I'd try a connected theme of Thursday articles this month. I've had some half-baked ideas floating around on the subject of “Point of View”. They haven't coalesced completely but I think I can figure out four articles on this topic over the ...

LISTEN!

Jason Moon, author of Crater's Edge, messaged me about some comments he had. He was perturbed about reader reaction to his storyline and wasn't sure how to handle the comments. I told him that those sorts of comments are the very greatest compliment an author can get ...

Just like the table scene, the dance scene can be an invaluable story telling tool: a way to showcase where your characters stand without having to force them to speak about it or have someone else infodump about it.

This stance can be on the characters that dance (i.e ...

So you've written this awesome scene, or placed your pawns (aka characters) just perfectly to create a perfect scenario… and then you are stuck.

There is no way you can solve the problem in a way that pans out well for the character or the plot, or what you ...

In my day job, I am occasionally asked to attend events or webinars as part of professional development. Earlier this week I happened to be at one of these activities focussing on the future of artificial intelligence, which you would think would be a riveting topic for discussion. But soon ...

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Today we talk about where our characters began, not their origin stories or why we started writing them but rather what they used to look like! Pitface was inspired to create a thread based on this idea by Emma Clare's newspost series of origin stories. So we just ...

Depicting a culture different to ours can be a tricky process. There are a ton of pitfalls involved, from showing a stereotypical (right down to racist) almost fetishized version of the actual culture to presenting it in a light directly connected to the author’s/creator’s culture (therefore either ...

Love spells have been a part of literature for a long, long time. A Midsummer Night's Dream comes to mind, by that William Shakespeare fella, where a love triangle/quadrangle is made more complex when the wrong target is affected. The correction has only one dude under the spell ...

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Comic books have long been a popular form of media. While their popularity declined slightly in the past, the industry is now more popular than ever. No longer are the comic book characters and story plots exclusive to comic books but have also been used to inspire many ...

A discussion at twitter (you should be there! If you haven’t looked for @Drunkduck you should, add DD and you’ll be added back!) brought to my attention a very subtle but very aesthetically and narratively pleasing element that, when we take the time as artists to factor it ...