I was surprised and saddened to learn just the other day that Rene Auberjonois passed away at the end of last year. Even before the upheaval of the pandemic hit us, I think life was busy and a bit chaotic, and I just missed it.

I'd been a fan ...

I grabbed the Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey 2-pack and rewatched then after many years. I knew those movies well when I was a youngster, especially the first one. Many, many repeat viewings. Both movies held up REALLY well, and feature “Fool ...

Many stories feature some kind of underdog in the beginning. This is a standard approach to a Protagonist. They may be very capable and bright, but have a lower status or disadvantage of some kind. This helps make them relatable and helps people root for them to win. Most mainstream ...

Preserving continuity is difficult with any writing project of length - with the weeks, months or more it might take to write a single novel or screenplay, it can be easy to forget things. So the problem is compounded if writing an extended series comic, TV or web series, movies or ...

In the early weeks of the pandemic, I started updating my comic more. Shortly after that, I took two weeks off work and went even harder.

I was updating furiously, at least in comparison to what I'd been doing for a year or two previous. In fact, after about ...

We've had some interesting discussions on various Newsposts, in the Forum and elsewhere on theduckwebcomics about knowing your ending, knowing your genre, planning ahead and outlining vs. ‘pantsing’ or ‘Discovery writing’, which is writing without knowing where you're going.

Though up to now I've mostly been a ...

Last week we talked about “writing what you know” … but how about ‘knowing what you write’? I knew I wanted to do this one as soon as I posted the previous article…just for the title.

In a TV show, series of books, movie, printed comic series, or newspaper strip ...

Writing what you know is one of those old canards that show up in writing advice, though it's not up there with things like “show, don't tell” and “this is supposed to be a literary essay - do not doodle in the margins”.

Or is that last one just ...

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 ...

Baneset Jones' Diary


We Three: Love Triangles

On the ‘terrible writing advice’ youtube channel, one of the running jokes is the over-reliance and overemphasis on love triangles in bad fiction.

Are they automatically bad, though?

They can be. If a character's main problem, regardless of genre, is having to ...