I was fishing for smelts the other day and scooped up an old bottle, with a rolled-up paper inside. It contained the following:

In older literature I think it was common to have a story told by a narrator who was never a part of the action. Someone who may ...

Reverse-Engineering Conflict in a Story
part one

Conflict is the basic material of a scene, and of a story. I've talked a lot over the years about structure and genre, and how all that stuff can work.

Another way to create a new story, and new characters, is to ...

In the early parts of the story, it helps the quality of the thing and the experience of the audience to layer in the details that will come into play later.

These are little character and world details that will come into play later - the sword that falls off the ...

Welcome to my Underground Layers

-Banes, your pop culture references are as on point as ever!



I've talked about story structure here many times, normally in similar ways.
A different approach to character and story, one I haven't used much personally, is what we could call the “onion ...

Some of my earliest memories are playing with Star Wars toys - my awareness of the first film and the toys are muddled together, but I clearly remember seeing The Empire Strikes Back, and vividly recall the couple-years-long wait after that, before Return of the Jedi would come and resolve the ...

I read some writing…advice? Or commentary? Or something like that years ago that pointed out how often amateur writers will create Protagonists who are writers. If I'm remembering correctly, this was expressed as a bad thing, probably because it's overdone. On the one hand, they say write ...

The other day I happened upon a movie called Primer from 2004. It's well regarded for how original it is and also for being made for only 7,000. That's a shockingly low price, even for low budget films.

I enjoyed it, though I found it a tough ...

When we think of a Protagonist, the standard type that comes to mind is the underdog, maybe a young character who goes on a difficult journey and learns some lessons and faces many challenges, or a capable person who gets in way over their head in some kind of intriguing ...

shields up!

Our struggles are probably different in some ways, and maybe the same in others. But as comic creators, there are certain issues many of us have in common:

Finding time to make our comics,
Spending too little time…or too much time on them,
Making decisions about our ...

Hey, I found an image of the actual moment! yeah, real good, there

Last time we took a look at the little moment in some stories where a character has a moment and realizes that in spite of being able to get what they want (valuable magic rocks, or to ...