I've talked many times about story structure. Even with a structural approach, there are a lot of questions to be answered, struggles to be had, and hard thinking to be done to make a story work.

One big moment that I like thinking about early in the writing is ...

As a sector of the working world scrambles to see how they can move a typical work day to a computer screen, observing a population of people stumbling to transition to face-to-face video conferencing apps like Zoom has been like watching the first ten seconds of an infomercial—the transition ...

classic tale of cause and effect!

Our very own Pickle-Face made a forum topic on the Duck, asking people to create a basic ‘cause and effect’ statement on their comic.

The structure goes something like this: Say what happens, and then what the effect is in the story. This is ...

It's all fine and exciting when using lore and myth to create new stories. Especially when it comes to modern genres like urban fantasy, it can yield pretty alluring and impressive results! From ancient Greek mythology to all kinds of Asian myths and legends, to Norse mythology and Egyptian ...

With more time spent at home, I have been able to dive into some of my favorite past-times that I used to do when I was middle school aged. One of them being playing video games. Growing up, Squaresoft and the Final Fantasy video game series completely shaped my identity ...

Webcomics don't need to follow rules.

They are often created by one person and don't need to answer to editors, publishers or money-type-people. They can be made by just you, and can be made for an audience of just a couple friends or relatives…or just for yourself ...

In the late nineties, mTV answered the call for the need of a high school student that was not centered around the cheerleading squad or the football jocks with Daria. Luckily, I was in junior high, living in the Southern California suburbs around the debut of the series, which meant ...

The suspension of disbelief happens automatically in readers and audiences if a story does its job.

Audiences WANT to believe in a story when they start reading or watching it.

I mean, you can' t count on everyone. I remember going to see the Benjamin Button movie and my friend ...

MacGuffin comin' through!


MacGuffins

I'm not sure if everyone knows this already, but a MacGuffin is a term that was made popular by Alfred Hitchcock, and is now widely used in writing and storytelling circles.

It is an item or event (or possibly even a character) that exists only ...

I've already written a bunch of articles on writing mental illness, so I figured I should write about writing therapists as well!

Oh, the woes for therapist representation in narrative works! All the stereotypes are there: from the shrink that is actually a little (or a lot) loopy and ...