There's nothing more frustrating when a character dies from a situation that had no reason occuring except perhaps that the writers wanted to be edgy and make the story have more gravitas with a random death that's forced into the plot.

I've talked often over the years ...

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 ...

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Main characters with main character syndrome? What is main character syndrome? Well the way we're dealing with it here it's normally a snide criticism you level and someone who seems to think the world revolves ...

always someone breakinnn' into twooooo…

AN important part of a story is the good old “Break into Act 2”.

It's not the easiest story structure moment to recognize, but it's one of the early ones I thought about and tried to notice in movies I watched.

Many people ...

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A standard thing in stories is to have multiple plot lines. In short stories or when you're just starting out as a writer you tend to have a single line, the A plot, but as soon ...

As the new dawn goes we sprinkle the seeds of unbound rascality
The calamity of the bygone drive-by solitude
For the youth that sows we sink our deeds in offshore synchronicity
The simplest treaty of the offbeat blastoff attitude
As the new dawn goes. As our yesters close. As first ...

It’s time for another Character Deep Dive, this within the amazing political war thriller The Second Crimean War by the awesome and proliferate The Doodler!

The Second Crimean War is an alternate history webcomic, of a different 1995 where, after the collapse of the USSR, the emerging, independent Ukraine ...

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This Quackcast was inspired by world renowned idiot Robert F Kennedy Jnr. We decided to talk about writing dumb characters. I keep calling him John F Kennedy Jnr because I am also an idiot. Some context: he ...

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 ...

I've been VERY slowly working on new comics ideas…way too many of them…for several years now. One of the decisions for me is what kind of STYLE the comic should be.

To be clear, I'm not a phenomenal artist, to say the least. So i don ...