Arbitrary Nonsense -

With spoilers for: The Sixth Sense; The Usual Suspects
A good twist is one that you could have guessed, but didn’t.
This is why so many stories fail in this regard. The perfect twist is predictable without being predictable. It is causal within the mind of the audience, and yet completely unforeseen. But how does anyone go about writing such a thing? And where do...

With spoilers for: Game of Thrones – Seasons 1 – 3
Try to put yourself in the place of Weiss & Benioff 5 years ago. Your job is to establish and illustrate a vast, quasi-Medieval universe – its characters, geography, politics, history, technology, weather patterns and the manner in which all of these...

With spoilers for: Game of Thrones, Seasons 1-3; Gladiator
Spoilers for Season 4 hidden; no book spoilers
A few months ago, I wrote a short piece on Jesse Pinkman and asked the question: are there any characters you hate because of their childlike nature? One commenter referred me to Joffrey Baratheon from Game of Thrones – and, yeah, fair enough....

With spoilers for: The Dark Knight
A few weeks ago, I did a short piece on Jesse Pinkman and concluded that there are many, often conflicting, ways of making a character likeable. Today, I just want to hit that point home a bit, by turning your attention to antagonists – and how they...