How do you make a clever character stupid?

You give them an infatuation. A fixation. Something that completely overrides their critical thinking and better judgment. Something that drives them nuts like a switch is thrown.

And when that happens, they're dumber than a bag of rocks. (And they're ...

With Valentine's day just behind us and a lot of talk of love, I thought I'd take a look on the exact opposite of love and affection- how do we write and display hatred in characters? How do characters hate, and what's the difference from rage?

In ...

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 ...

So we come to the end of this long litany of presentations on Jung’s assorted archetypes that craftsmen of the narrative arts have used since time immemorial to weave their yarns.

And what better way to end with the crowning jewel in every story, from books to movies to ...

Is there a word for these?

I’m talking about those things that you automatically start drawing when you have a piece of paper and no specific ideas in mind. The images that find their way into the margins of your notebooks, onto napkins in restaurants…or on a whiteboard ...

Good evening viewers, thank you for tuning in. A lot has happened this week. Arizona has finally shown its crazy. Louisiana is in mortal environmental danger again. People find a car bomb in New York City and New Yorkers say “eh.” Britain is getting ready to lynch its entire government ...