Character Motivation

One thing I appreciate in well written stories is the hidden motivations of characters. Well written characters, just like real people, have contradictions to them. Desires and needs that are sometimes in conflict with each other.

Story structure tells us that a character has to WANT something. The ...

A succubus is a very particular kind of demon, sexy and extremely dangerous… And Mary is an exceptionally dangerous demon. Mary wasn't always a succubus, she had a very traumatic transition into becoming one. She was human and alive once, a horrible event changed all that. Now she's ...

Niccea has an Awards Announcement:

Whew! Here we go again. I'm going to get everything moving now. 

I'm going to open up the awards for For Your Consideration pages now. The rules are simple: keep the page rated PG or so and use the theme in your page ...

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Let's talk about total immersion… When consuming media rather than creating it, if you're lucky you become immersed: the struggles and fears of the character ...

There is no story without a theme. Even when written without anything prepared in terms of a message, a story will always give people things to think about and messages drawn from how the story was set up and how it was resolved (if at all).

So I don't ...

Photo: (clockwise from upper left) nightmarelunatic’s gift for Andreas_Helixfinger; sleeping_gorilla’s for Tantz_Aerine; lothar’s gift for usedbooks; kawaiidaigakusei’s gift for davidxolukoga; and Tantz_Aerine’s gift for hushicho.

A huge Thank You goes out to all the participants of this year’s Secret Santa gift art exchange! Everyone ...

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Merry Christmas and whatever you celebrate :)
Interesting topic from Banes! It's his idea that sometimes the literal elements of a story (the plot etc.) are simply ...

There are a couple of movies I've seen - only a couple that come to mind - with a very specific issue
that makes them not work for me.

It's when the THEME or below-the-surface meaning of the story holds together but the actual plot suffers for it.

Spoiler for ...

When I was growing up in the 80s, stories that were marketed as ‘children’s' were occasionally brutal.

Characters got maimed or killed, tortured or traumatized, met with horrid ends in worlds that were anything but rosy. And this was a pattern that wasn't limited to, say, English literature ...

Ideas both big and deep can - and has - been explored in Sci Fi. Some themes that have resonated with me include ‘What it Means to be Human’. This could be said to be the point of ALL fiction in a way I suppose. But to explore humanity through the lens ...