When mapping out any kind of superheroic narrative, a consideration has to be made that is not often an aspect of other types of stories, and by that I mean you have to determine power level, or maybe we should say Power Level, since so many superheroic concepts work better with capitals.

This is not just a concern of traditional “long underwear” types of superhero stories either. Really, any story in which characters are differentiated from the usual run of people in their setting by powers above and beyond the norm can be termed a superhero story. This can be a movie script, a story or novel, a comic, or even a roleplaying game. Before you ever start plotting, you should decide on what kinds of power level your characters will transact, and that starts with the setting itself.

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Please see the comments below. Thanks.

Please see the comments below. Thanks!

Please see the comments below. Thanks!

Please see the comments below. Thanks!

Please see the comments below.

Short version: Dr. Short at the University of Oklahoma conducted a study which found that graphic novels helped students learn material more easily and were preferred by 80% of the students. You can enroll for free here to test whether they are more effective for you.

Here’s an example of the study incorporating visual cues to make business-school material easier to learn/understand:

If you’d like to see for yourself, please enroll for their free option here:

I’m definitely in; diagrams and other visual cues really helped me in school, especially in understanding complex processes with distinct phases like the Krebs Cycle in biology and the earmarking process in congressional budgeting.

We live in a world where technology has taken over our lives and it has got to the point where it is saving lives but where did this notion of technology saving lives come from, the answer is superheroes. Many people think of superheroes as a comic book character but there is more to them than meets the eye. Have you ever studied the abilities and power they have? If not, then this infographic below will show you what the real value of their powers and abilities are and how it can influence life in the real world.

From DC Comics to Marvel characters, these characters have influenced the growth of technology. The U.S army for instance has looked to them as role models when developing super human soldiers. The “Iron Man” soldiers are just one form of technological advancements and as you shall see in this real superhero powered infographic it has been a wise investment. Much research goes into developing powered technology and armour suits and this has inspired the medical community to develop products that will help those with disabilities. Superheroes have even influenced the digital world we live in, no one would have thought that Tupac would return from the dead through a hologram, but he did through the inspiration of the Green Lantern from DC Comics.

The world incorporates many super humans and through some real training and parkour movements you could be the next superhero.
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I’m currently writing a page for a U.S. company which is targeting business worldwide. At one point, we have a form which asks for a “ZIP code” rather than a “postal code” or “postcode.” As far as I’m aware, only the U.S. and the Philippines use the phrase “ZIP code.” Would the phrase “zip code” be hard to understand and/or annoying for many international readers? It seems like it could be a problem. Then again, I have been pleasantly flummoxed before–while writing a proposal for The Taxman Must Die, I asked ~20 international readers if they knew what the IRS was, and almost all of them did (including several readers too young to have paid income taxes).  Apparently antipathy for taxmen is global.

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I categorized this post as “Questions, Frequently-Asked and Otherwise.” Umm… definitely otherwise, I think.

1. Bank robberies with faceless criminals that never had a chance of accomplishing anything. If you’re mainly including this scene to give the superhero(es) a chance to show off their powers, I would recommend reevaluating whether anything is at stake and whether the scene actually contributes anything to the story. For example, Dark Knight’s opening bank robbery does a really good job developing the Joker and the main antagonist-vs.-antagonist conflict, even though the main character is not at stake.

2. Any scene featuring more or less helpless antagonists. If your superhero’s opponents cannot challenge him, there’s probably very little at stake, which means that the fight will create very little suspense. Some possible solutions:

• Give the hero stronger opposition. For example, if your hero’s superpowers are incredible enough that he can only be challenged by someone with superpowers, it’d be worth considering a plotting element which makes it easier in your universe for low-grade antagonists to get superpowers or some sort of threatening capabilities. (For example, perhaps criminals can buy a temporary super-serum or a Hulk-grade hunting rifle).
• Change the scene so that it’s harder for the character to use his powers (e.g. characters with fire-based powers should probably be careful if there are innocent bystanders and/or volatile chemicals present).
• Give the character(s) problems which his/her powers can’t effortlessly solve. For example, it’d probably be more interesting to see The Thing deal with a hurricane than a guy with a gun. The gunman probably isn’t challenging. Alternately, the hero might be in a situation where the character can’t openly use his superpowers because they’d blow his secret identity.
• Weaken the character’s powers. For example, a faster-than-sound character could probably defeat an average bank robber with little (if any) difficulty or drama. A character that could merely run at ~60 miles per hour would have to put more thought into it, particularly if hostages are involved.
• Temporarily reduce the character’s capabilities. For example, perhaps the character is injured or temporarily has lost access to his/her superpowers (like during an eclipse in Heroes).
• Increase the cost of the character’s superpowers. Please see #2 in How to Keep Your Story’s Superpowers Extraordinary.

3. Confrontations between protagonists which hinge on a protagonist(s) being irredeemably stupid. Particularly with protagonist-vs-protagonist conflicts, I’d recommend making both characters at least somewhat sympathetic. For example, in The Dark Knight, both Lucius and Batman have a likable reason to oppose each other on the use of a cutting-edge tracking system. In contrast, if one (or worse, both) sides are wildly dumb and/or childish (e.g. see Batman & Robin), the conflict is more likely to make readers want to brain everybody involved and throw the story in a fire.

3.1. “I hate you because I’m one-dimensionally evil and/or stupid.” Common offenders: abusive parents, bullies, and Jim Crow stand-ins (e.g. more or less every non-mutant in X-Men). If you have to demote characters to mind-numbing unlikability, I’d recommend doing so sparingly. For a potential solution here, I’d recommend checking out how Homeland and The Wire treated mostly unsympathetic antagonists (terrorists and drug dealers, respectively) with some degree of human empathy. It made them feel more believable and the conflicts against them more satisfying.

4. Any scene where the main character does the same thing(s) 95%+ of other superheroes would have done. Give your characters more chances to be original. For example, in a particular scene, is there anything the superhero does or says which is really unique? If not, I’d recommend reevaluating the character development (so that the characters have more unusual traits to act on) and/or reworking the plot so that the characters have more chances to demonstrate these traits.  For example, if you have a superhero who is uncommonly loyal to his friends, you could make his/her loyalty more memorable by developing friends that many superheroes would not be loyal to. In Point of Impact, the main character is a fugitive that risks his life breaking his dog’s corpse out of an FBI-guarded morgue. The scene develops the character very effectively–he risks himself for honor in a way that almost no protagonist would have and it establishes how isolated he is (the dog is the closest thing the protagonist had to friends or family).  

5. Any funeral scene so generic that 95% of the words could apply to 95% of superheroes. E.g. “Captain Awesome was a great hero who risked himself for us on so many occasions” while teammates sob about how hard it is that he’s gone. Boohoohoo, nobody cares. I’d strongly recommend moving towards more distinctive scenes–e.g. you can focus instead on teammates/friends/family sharing memorable stories showing us what kind of person the fallen superhero was, and that would help readers genuinely care on their own that he’s gone. I’d recommend staying away from eulogies, especially by faceless extras–it’s generally not the best approach to making your funeral scene memorable.

5.1. Any funeral scene where the character isn’t actually dead*. Personally, I’d probably lean towards a quick rejection on an unsolicited manuscript here–the scene (and the death arc in general) is probably a waste of time. Also, this is very cliche–see pretty much every comic book funeral. For best-selling superheroes, it’s sort of justifiable because actually killing the character would leave millions of dollars on the table. Most unsolicited manuscripts don’t have that excuse.

Exception: The readers know the funeral’s not real. E.g. characters holding a fake funeral to convince an enemy that the hero is no longer a threat. This is more promising because you’re not asking readers to be emotionally invested in a supposed death which won’t actually go anywhere.

Will Beall, the screenwriter for the upcoming Justice League movie, just had his first movie (Gangster Squad) out. It averaged 33% on Rotten Tomatoes (thanks to “lackluster writing and underdeveloped characters”) and disappointed at the box office. I think this bodes poorly for the JL movie.

To recap:

• Writing the Justice League movie will likely be much more challenging than a relatively simple police shoot-em-up. (For example, several of the Justice League characters have their own movies in the works, so the creative coordination will be more complicated).
• Introducing multiple characters simultaneously on a team would be challenging for a very good screenwriter.
• It does not look like DC-WB has A-grade writing talent on this.
• Several directors have passed on Beall’s outline/script for Justice League (which might suggest problems with the outline, or might be totally unrelated).
• DC-WB’s had some notable problems with scheduling/delays before (e.g. Green Lantern’s production delays set back marketing efforts by months and contributed to the under-editing).
• Avengers 2 is scheduled for release in May 2015. DC-WB’s under pressure to get JL out in time to face Avengers 2, but Justice League doesn’t even have a director yet. Hollywood studios sometimes rush out godawful movies before they’re ready because of pressure from competing films (e.g. Skyline vs. Battle: Los Angeles).

I’m lowering my Rotten Tomatoes prediction for Justice League from 30-45% to 25-35%.

PS: Speaking of box office results this week, the three top-performing theaters for Zero Dark Thirty (a movie about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden)  were within 5 miles of the CIA headquarters in Langley, VA.

I won’t mince words: this movie was generally disastrous, juvenile, and the plot was driven by idiocy. However, the final confrontation between the hero and the villain is incredible–the best of any Pixar movie. If you need help writing a more interesting climax to your story, I’d recommend checking it out.

Here’s a spoiler-laden breakdown of the scene:

• The hero has a few minutes before a bomb will kill him. Only the lead villain (identity unknown) can defuse it.
• In this situation, most heroes would run off with the bomb to ensure it does not risk anybody else (e.g. Dark Knight Rises).
• The hero instead confronts a character meeting with the Queen on a wild-eyed hunch that this character is the villain.

Here’s a few reasons this makes for an incredible scene:

• The confrontation between the hero and lead villain is not a fight. The hero uses the bomb to blackmail the villain into defusing the bomb (thereby admitting that he is the villain). This confrontation is much more interesting than a fight would have been (particularly considering that neither the hero nor the villain is an especially capable combatant).
• There is doubt as to whether the main character’s actually picked out the villain correctly. Besides being a successful businessman, there isn’t any reason to guess that the CEO is a supervillain.
• This confrontation raises the stakes beyond just the main character dying. His plan brings several civilians (including the Queen) into risk if the bomb goes off. First, this was effective because I cared more about the side-characters–the main character was so relentlessly annoying up until this point that I was hoping he would die. Second, this created an unexpected and surprisingly dramatic conflict with non-villains (the Queen’s security team).

Silverfish: “I’m writing a novel about facing your fears and learning from your past mistakes. The story is told from the perspective of a superhuman with incredible power, but a flawed personality and with much to learn. He is chased by the demons from his past: not only the hauntings from his past mistakes, but also the superhuman cult he has recently betrayed. At least at the start, a lot of the updates on this forum will be character and setting development.”

“My target audience: 16-20 year olds that enjoy action with moments of emotional turmoil. This will probably be targeted more towards a more stereotypical male audience, as I do not intend on including a romance throughout the novel, and the violence might be quite graphic.”

“Author experience: I have no professional experience in writing, though I definitely need to improve my writing skills as they are, put mildly, bad. Therefore, I would ask that you please be polite, but do criticise my work when needed.”

Please see the comments below to learn more.

Especially if you’re interested in historical fiction, I’d recommend checking these infographics for a better idea of how much harder it was to move hundreds or thousands of miles before railroads were widely available.

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• If you’ve ever wondered why so many stores use bizarre prices rather than whole numbers (e.g. $9.99 rather than $10), check out my article on pricing psychology. (Short answer: the prices look cheaper, so customers are more likely to buy).
• Ads with the word “you” or “your” are generally more likely to persuade readers to make a purchase. Personally, my ads with “you”/”your” are about 11% more persuasive. I’m not sure that people consciously notice these little personal touches, but they definitely have an effect. 
• Some people read an ad and are wavering so close to making a purchase that even a little burst of enthusiasm might seal the deal. My ads with a single exclamation point are 6% more persuasive. Fortunately, nobody likes multiple exclamation points. I’d go crazy if I had to write like this!!!
• I mainly write 2-line online ads for Google, so my perspective here may be biased. In my limited experience, customers are more receptive to an unsubstantiated claim (like “Great [products]“) than any sort of evidence to substantiate the claim.
• The average customer actually does care about proofreading. My strongest recommendation for young writers would be to pay attention as closely as possible to spelling/punctuation/grammar in school, especially if you are thinking about possibly pursuing a full-time writing job.

Please see the comments below. Thanks!

My 2012 resolutions were:

• Increase SN site traffic from 600 hits per day to 900 (50% growth). We averaged 960 (60% growth). Thanks for your help! We had 350,000 hits this year.
• Get in the top 2 results on Google searches for list of superpowers and superpower list. This is hard to measure, because Google personalizes search results, but on this computer I haven’t previously used for SN, SN ranks #3 on list of superpowers and #4 on superpower list. I was previously #6 and #7.
• Get published. Learning to Write Superhero Stories is out! It sold enough copies to clear its advance in its first month, which was definitely a pleasant surprise.

My 2013 resolutions:

• Increase site traffic from 350,000 hits to 500,000 (47% growth). If you happen to know any writers or frequent any other writing websites, please feel free to recommend SN articles whenever helpful. SN fans on National Novel Writing Month forums and TV Tropes were our MVPs this year. Thanks, guys!
• Generate $2500 in royalties on my first book this year.  That’d be about 850 sales.
• Generate $5 $15 million in total sales with writing. Typical book sale: $5-10. Most recent nuclear reactor sale: north of $1 million. Clearly, I went into the wrong hobby.
• Get 25 Amazon ratings for my book this year. If you’ve read my book, I’d really appreciate if you would take 3-5 minutes to rate it on Amazon. Ratings and reviews play a huge role in Amazon sales.
• Publish another book (of Pixar movie reviews) in 2013. I’ll probably self-publish this time.  In addition, I’m preparing for a superhero writing guidebook (rather than movie reviews) in 2014.
• Get a dog! The first name that came to mind was “Chompy,” so I might need some help there.
• Pray Aaron Rodgers gives up those Wisconsin hippies for Chicago. Or AT LEAST BEAT THE VIKINGS SO WE MAKE THE PLAYOFFS. I’m not looking forward to recapping this point next year.

Brief Overview of the Job

I’m an adwriter specializing in online pay-per-click advertising.  My main job responsibilities are:

1. Writing Google/Bing ads which attract as many likely customers to our clients as possible.
2. Managing the campaigns, keywords, and price-settings to do #1 as cost-efficiently as possible.
3. Working with our design team to convert as many of the people that click on our ads into actual customers as possible. I write copy and help with design planning. #3 is probably a larger part of my job than for most people in similar positions.

My other job functions include writing blog posts and webpages for clients and calculating rate-of-return on our ad-spend (i.e. figuring out whether our ads are profitable and how to make them more profitable).
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He’ll be fine after the publicity stunt passes. The only thing that can actually kill a superhero is bad sales.

Nayan is working on a comic book miniseries. Please see the comments below.

One young writer emailed today about writing jobs. If you’d be interested in sharing your experience and building your online presence, please write an article about a writing position you’ve held. (Preferably this article would help a college student or recent graduate learn more about the job and/or land it).

If you’d like some ideas to get you started, here are some points which could help:

• Brief overview of the job.
• What does a typical workday or week look like?
• What is most challenging about your job?
• What did you like most about your job? Least?
• What sort of coursework and/or extracurricular experience might be helpful for succeeding in this job? (For example, if you’re interested in writing online ads, the ability to automate basic tasks in Excel will make your life a LOT easier).
• Skills/traits most important to getting position.
• Interview tips.
• Resume tips.
• Anything you wish you had known about the job before you started or when you were in college.
• Knowing what you do now, is there anything you would have done to prepare for the job?
• Any resources you would recommend for people looking to get into this field.

Optional Details

• As long as the article gives a decent introduction to a writing job, everything else is flexible.
• If you would benefit from a length guideline rather than something more open-ended, many of our articles are in the 250-500 word range.
• If you’d prefer a structure to follow, you can use this as a template if you’d like.

Preferably off the top of your head, which 1-3 Superhero Nation articles have helped you improve the most as a writer? (If you need help refreshing your memory, please see our list of writing articles).  Thanks for your help–I’m putting together a short list of our best articles and I’d like to know which ones you would include.

A few seconds ago, I saw a car doing ~30 miles per hour in reverse in a residential area, which is the oddest example of speeding I’ve seen. Your writing prompt today is to write a scene which incorporates a character violating some rule or law but in a very odd and/or unexpected way.

Some possibilities:

• Breaking and entering for some extremely unusual reason (besides being Santa Claus).
• Getting into a high-speed chase with police for an extremely unusual reason (besides trying out for NASCAR).
• Sneaking through airport security for an extremely unusual reason (besides being a Congressman).
• Trying to start a fight for an extremely unusual reason (besides being in Fight Club).
• Stealing someone’s glasses for an extremely unusual reason (besides being Agent Orange).
• Breaking into jail or a waste management facility (for any reason).
• Any really fun and/or exotic violations of laws against weapons of mass destruction (e.g. a science fair bottle rocket with a propellant of more than four ounces).

Which two of your characters would be hardest to merge into a single character? How would you go about doing it?

Some possibilities which come to mind:

• Can you use one character’s motivations (why he/she wants to do something) to add something to the other character’s goals (what he/she wants to do)? Sometimes a really counterintuitive motivation can open up fresh plotting possibilities. For example, if Character 1 is a cop trying out for SWAT because he’s suicidally brave and Character 2 became a forensic accountant because it was a safe career path might be merged into a cop trying out for SWAT because… he wants to stay safe. What convinced the cop that SWAT was his safest option? For example, maybe an unknown person or people on his unit are trying to get him killed–it’s probably more interesting than someone deciding to join SWAT for a more standard reason.
• Do one character’s personality traits interact with the other character’s personality traits and/or goals in an interesting way? For example, applying Batman’s isolation and/or dearth of empathy to Superman might make Superman feel like more of an actual alien rather than essentially a human with superpowers.
• Which elements of the characters’ background would you change for the merged character? What would you keep?

If you need help coming up with characters to merge, here are some possibilities…

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Amazon Prime users can download my superhero writing advice here from the Kindle Lending Library.

I just received a royalty payment for my book of superhero movie reviews for writers/screenwriters. I think that means it has earned out (sold enough copies to cover the advance). If you bought a copy, thanks! If you haven’t, give it a look!

In Skyfall, M remarks offhandedly that “orphans always make the best recruits” as secret agents. She doesn’t explain, but I would infer that she means that commitment matters more than anything else in her line of work, and that a person with a family won’t be as fully committed because they somewhere to leave to and may have been raised with more inhibitions than someone with a harder upbringing.

In your story, are there any traits or demographic characteristics which are unusually important for your heroes (or villains)? In particular, if you have a team of heroes, what are they looking for when they choose members? (For example, what should a superhero team be looking for besides superpowers? If a team takes random people off the street on life-or-death missions because they happen to have superpowers, does that strike anybody involved as desperate and/or crazy? If not, why not?) If you have a main hero, does he/she have the trait in question? If not, how does he/she get around that?

1. I think the most important aspect is to develop your characters beyond one-dimensional cliches. Generally speaking, a few interesting characters will excite readers much more than many not-so-interesting characters would. Unless you’re doing children’s television, I’d recommend against a Power-Rangers-style setup where the members on a team have a single trait. For example, if your team consists of characters who have nothing going on besides a single trait/archetype (e.g. a hothead, a curious scientist, and an immature joker in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), it’s probably less promising than it could be. In contrast, Tony Stark had all of those traits and I think it both made him a deeper and more interesting character while enhancing his dramatic possibilities with other characters (especially in Avengers). For example, Tony Stark’s curiosity combines with his lack of restraint when he decides to cattle-prod Bruce Banner to see if Banner has the Hulk situation under control. Batman’s preparation and paranoia come together in Justice League when he pulls out Kryptonite against a enemy and cryptically says he had it on hand as an “insurance policy.” In contrast, I think there are only two types of scenes between Raphael the hothead and Leonardo the hardass leader (scenes where they hate each other and scenes where they don’t). There’s only so many ways you can have characters act out a single trait with each other.

2. Another problem I’ve seen occasionally is where large superhero teams cut the roles too fine. I’ve seen 3-page synopses for stories which have (say) 8+ characters and half of the characters only get a line of description along the lines of “Avatar has fire powers and defends the base” or “Gridley is incredibly intelligent and is the team’s hacker” or whatever. I would recommend making your characters more versatile than that. For example, pretty much any superhero can defend the base–if base-defense is plot-relevant, just rotate that task among the notable characters or delegate it to a faceless extra that won’t take much space, but please don’t just randomly insert a character that will take space without actually getting to be interesting (or at least develop more interesting characters).

For example, let’s say a team has a scientist, a hacker, a soldier, an explosives expert, an outdoorsman/hunter, a negotiator, and a criminal. I think the most intuitive (though not necessarily best) approach would be to merge some of the characters (e.g. a scientist/hacker, a soldier with a background in wilderness recon and explosives, and a silver-tongued criminal). However, you can mix and match pretty much any of these archetypes into more promising combinations. For example, you could have a criminal scientist, a USAF hacker, a survivalist that knows far more about bombs than he can admit to, and a negotiator that enjoys coercion and/or blackmail far too much. Or a scientist that’s fascinated by explosions, a military hostage-negotiator (or a special forces operative with really good people skills), and a frightfully competent hunter/poacher who’s been coerced by the authorities into helping them catch the antagonist, etc.  Hell, if you wanted to, you could probably combine most of all of those characters into 1-2 characters (e.g. a spy with both electronic and physical skills whose main job is tracking down a target and either convincing him to defect or eliminating him).

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*Erm, unless you’re under age or Tuvaluan or something.

A lot of the comedy was impeccable and the writers did a lot more with side-characters (especially a hardened/paranoid space Marine and affable Fix-It Felix) than I’m used to seeing from Disney.  It had many of the best traits of Pixar movies–unusually innovative scene selection, strong characterization all around, emotionally effective protagonist-vs-protagonist conflict, an unusually interesting villain, an engaging romance, memorable bits of flair (e.g. two awesome space marine weddings), etc. There were a few more kiddy elements (e.g. too much toilet humor and slapstick), but on the whole this movie was extremely adult-friendly (definitely more so than Pixar’s last movie, Brave). Although Wreck-It Ralph involves video games, I think the movie would be highly enjoyable even if you’re not a video game fan. (In contrast, I think Scott Pilgrim would be sort of weird for people that were looking for a more traditional superpowered story).

FIVE YEAR OLD: “Now that I’m President of Candyland, everybody that was ever mean to me will be… executed.”
SPACE MARINE: “This place suddenly got a lot more interesting.”