A simple yet powerful concept to understand in writing is, what I call, Dramatic Narrative Emphasis. It’s most obvious to recognize when it comes to Master Theme, but really applies […]

Surprise is the lifeblood of story. In Maximizing your Turns, I talk a bit about foreshadowing your turns—actually foreshadowing the opposite of your turns to make them more dramatic. But […]

Your inciting incident or story catalyst is the event or occurrence that change’s the main character’s existing paradigm and allows the story to take place. Everything before the inciting incident […]

Pacing is critical to the comic reading experience and to the well executed script. It’s the glue that binds the reader. Too much, things get bogged down… attention spans wander, […]

In long prose novel writing, one of the ways you keep the reader engaged in the story is to directly connect one chapter to the next. If you intrigue the […]

So you’ve read Scene Selection and Narrative Drive and have a good understanding of which scenes stop narrative drive dead in its tracks… You understand that comics are a highlight […]

At the end of Storycraft for Comics I talk about nomenclature for a few pages. One of the things I discuss, is a problem I see often in original universe […]

So you’ve written an outline and now you’re sitting down to script an issue. In my experience you’ll almost always have a surplus of scenes (especially if you’re scripting a […]

A critical concept in writing (comic or otherwise) is understanding the difference between “Threat of Violence” and “Violence” itself. The former creates tension, a cornerstone of good storytelling (and a […]