I was rewatching “Sleeping With the Enemy” recently - it's a thriller from back in the early 90's. It's got Julia Roberts JUST before she became a superstar, a tense scene involving bath towels, an iconic use of the song ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ - and a moustache of evil ...

I have a friend who's told me, on and off, about the movie/book/comic series he's working on. I noticed at one point that he had a tendency to add in more and more characters, plots, and details that were going to show up in the project ...

The Anti Continuity

Last time I brought up the ‘standalone episode series’ and the ‘serialized episodes’ approach.

Used Books mentioned Anthologies, which is (kind of) the anti-continuity approach. I love anthologies, and have contributed to a few over the years.

Nothing but respect to The Twilight Zone, one of the ...

I'm still rewatching Star Trek the Next Generation, slowly, and Better Call Saul as well. Both are a treat, and they use pretty much opposite types of continuity. Or close to it -

Next Gen was made in the 80's and early 90's. At the time, the decree ...

Better Call Saul is the prequel series to Breaking Bad. Both shows are incredible, and probably my two favorite shows. The characters in these shows, especially Better Call Saul, have great nuance to them, and most of them have multiple “wants” or “needs” that are in opposition to each other ...

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've started a few webcomics at this point, and all of them are ongoing…well, at least in theory.

There's always the question of where to start. What's page one gonna be?

With my first comic, Typical Strange, I LABORED over that decision for years.

Kind of ...

A tried and true story trope is the “forced together”.

I think it was the director Sidney Lumet who said that he really enjoyed the tension that came from
this kind of situation. Taking two people who would never choose to be together are stuck in
a bad situation. It ...

badum-tsss

I thought the first time I appreciated comedy that was “bad on purpose”, it was Fred Willard in Best in Show.
It's possible that some of his quips and comments were funny, or funny to some people…but the point of that character (a clueless commentator at a ...

One story structure, that ozoneocean and I talked about many years ago on the Quackcast, was the Lone Protagonist as drifter.

In Pulp Fiction, Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) says talks about leaving the life of crime to walk the Earth. “Like Kane in Kung Fu. Help people, get in adventures ...