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 ...

edward norton in “primal fear”

One of the things I like in fiction is characters who are not what they seem.

Like all things, this sort of thing can be done well, or badly, or somewhere in between. It can be fascinating and surprising, or cliche and predictable. It can ...

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As promised we dive right into the second half of the Star Wars chat! We cover all the Star Wars stuff besides the original trilogy and the ...

Today, while on a coffee break with my gaggle of Red Cross guys, a friend told me that he had dabbled in writing stories, after a vignette he'd written at school received an award. His mother though was skeptical, and when she went to read it in the exhibit ...

The Death of the Method?


In the past, I've been a proponent of the Banes Method - really, the Save the Cat Method - of story construction and story improvement.

The method became all the rage in film production in Hollywood apparently - and has received some criticism as well, for being ...

I remember way back in the day, hearing a writer on the cartoon ‘King of the Hill’, who'd been a writer on ‘The Simpsons’ saying that on the Simpsons, is was all about how many jokes you could get in a scene…in a page…and even how many ...

Inspiration is a flighty and whimsical thing. We don't know when we'll get it and sometimes we never do when we need it. Even others, we get it when we least need it, or when we can't use it. Or when we're sleeping, and lose it ...

Earlier this week, I stumbled upon a forum post from another comic website asking webcomic creators what they would do if they had an entire year to themselves without having to worry about financial obligations such as bills or rent and it was interesting to see the results.

A number ...

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*Cover-art from the movie poster for METROPOLIS, not Atlas shrugged :)

This Quackcast is about having political agendas in your work and expressing them well!
We're talking ...

There is a general idea that cliches, when they surface in the narrative of a story, be it movie, tv or webcomics or anything else, is a sign of bad writing.

There is of course a good basis for this presumption, because usually a cliche is a plot device, or ...