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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 ...

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Art from Wikipedia

Welcome to the the yungle
Characters make or break a story. In this quackcast Tantz Aerine brings all her skills as a head-shrink to bear and gives us the low-down on Jungian character archetypes! Jung was a clever Swiss bloke, a contemporary of that strange fellow ...

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Art by ozoneocean

We titled this one “Cafecast” on the suggestion of Pitface! Instead of chatting about a subject, we took ourselves off to a metaphorical cafe and all started drawing, working on sketches, our latest comic pages, and chatting as we did. We're all comic artists after ...

Comedic Characters - You Take the Good, you Take the Bad…

This week we continue talking comedy. Last time we started creating characters by choosing a “STRONG COMIC PERSPECTIVE”…like greed, innocence, obseque–obquestri–obteq– uh, weasellishness, and then EXAGGERATING that perspective to the extreme.

Now we finish creating our characters ...

Failure is the stepping stone to success. That’s what I teach my students and my clients, and it is true, right up there with “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”: If you learn why you failed, you won’t fail again the same way- and that brings ...

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What defines evil in fiction?
I say the simplest one is bad guys are selfish, good guys are selfless.
That is massively over simplistic but it's a good easy template for basic hero's and villains. Basic ones
I was just doing a quick thought experiment to work ...

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Art by Ozoneocean

For THIS particular DD Quackcast we were inspired by clever and incisive newsposts made by Pitface and Kawaii. Kawaii made a great post about the idea of going for your dreams before it's too late, using the Paradise Falls trip from the movie UP as ...

Today we'll talk sequel and series character arcs, and focus on the cinematic portrayal of Iron Man

Last Week we talked about character arcs. They're an important element of fiction writing…although a lot of the time, there is no arc! But a strong, unpredictable character arc can ...

Endings are hard. We all know that. We have to tie up all the loose ends, answer all the questions, and pay off all the characters. We have to give a resolution that hopefully leaves our readers satisfied.

I know of a couple ways to deconstruct a story, and to ...