Last Week we looked at the “Break Into 2”, the transition between the beginning of a story: The “Before” picture of the Protagonist and their world, and the “Upside Down World” of Act 2.

So, a little later in your average story will come the “Break Into 3”. This leaves ...

Characters want something - this is a basic building block of storytelling. Identifying what a main character wants is a big step in defining that character. Figure out how they go about trying to get it - that's the beginning of a story. Figure out what's stopping them from getting ...

I think many of us who make comics or write stories or are interested in writing can agree that mistake number one in writing is to front-load a story with a long-winded backstory. We've talked about it here on the site plenty of times.

There is an opposite mistake ...

Since I first read it, the book “Save The Cat!” has been incredibly useful to me as far as thinking about stories, outlining them, and finishing them. It's a fun way to approach structure, and applies to a LOT of mainstream stories.

It's become an essential textbook in ...

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 ...

Welcome to part two of a twenty-seven part series about outlining simple comedy plots!

Who is the Hero
What Does the Hero Want?
The Door Opens
The Hero Takes Control


So last week we went over the first two items. A particular character who wants something on a surface level ...

Howdy!

I was going to go over the structure of a comedy story, based on the fine book “The Comic Toolbox” by Jason Voorhees.

If you have the interest, I can go into the structure outlined by Jason; he lays out a few different options that you may find useful ...

There is a slightly odd trend in screenwriting for indie films called Mumblecore where the actors are given a very minimal to non-existent script to work from and are forced into creating natural dialogue on the spot. I believe the director has a general story outline of where he or ...

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Art by Ozoneocean

Content:
Back in January our own HippieVan was in a quandary as to how to turn a creative idea she had into a webcomic, so she decided to put it o the DD community and croudsource their wisdom via a newspost. Banes and I thought the ...

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Summery:
This marks the beginning of our story writing month! We're focusing exclusively and intensively on the art of writing, following on naturally from Kroatz's clever take on the concept of the monomyth. Bane's special interest and expertise is in scriptwriting, particularly movie screenwriting, so this ...