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Thought you guys might find these interesting. They're from my series on how to make a TG comic which I'm posting over at tgcomics.com.

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Story being an extremely broad and extremely varied topic. I'm sure you could probably purchase whole textbooks about what I'm briefly covering each week, so just know I'm skimming over a mountain of concepts here. If you are interested in learning more about how stories work, I would recommend beginning with "The Hero With A Thousand Faces" by Joseph Campbell, very enlightening.

So you've got yourself an idea for a TG story. Very good, I'm sure it's excellent. Now you're going to want to spin that idea, whatever it may be, into an actual story that someone might want to read. For the purposes of this blog, I'm going to be focusing on turning a TG transformation into a whole comic, seeing as how most of us reading here are into that sort of thing.

TG transformation is quite a powerful subject matter for a story. It definitely covers enough of a major change in a character's life to be the sole focus of the plot, however it can also be used very effectively as a jumping off point to address larger themes and issues your characters might face.

Where your transformation takes place within the plot is important. You might have a killer idea for how your unsuspecting man is going to turn into a beautiful woman, but there's a lot of other stuff you need to consider.

Let's say your character changes at the beginning of the story. Consider this, your character wakes up in bed, only to find that they've transformed into a woman..

These are just questions, and it's important that you're constantly questioning your work. As you can see from those three story snippets, the role that your transformation plays within your story can be starkly different depending on context.

It's not as simple as going I have a killer idea for this or that. If you want your readers to stay hooked, you have to give them enough of a reason to continue through the story. I think that's where you need to build your story out.

I find spitballing, sitting down at your notepad or computer, and just writing out all the ideas that come to you for a story, works really well. You can trim or expand different aspects of the story, and then you try to fit it into some kind of structure. Are you telling the whole story in one go? Is it going to have chapters? Both bring their own challenges.

As I talked about above, a story's three act structure is enough to present an infinity of questions and challenges to the writer, and that's just a beginning, middle and end. I would maybe keep the complexity low with your first stories, and expand out from there.

Answering the questions you consider while playing your ideas out on the page is how you generate your stories.

"Okay, so he's going to be transformed by his fairy godmother. How does someone even get a fairy godmother..?"

An hour later...

"But if the spell only lasts until midnight, what about sleeping over at Brad's place? Does that mean she'll turn back overnight..?"

Two hours later...

"If she ends up happily ever after, should the story be more lighthearted from the beginning..?"

You end up writing pages and pages of text that will never get used for anything, but they help you structure and hone your work from a series of unconnected ideas, into a logical thought-line, which then becomes a story.

In conclusion, you want to take your ideas, and flesh them out, then flesh them out again. Then you're going to have to write all of them down on paper. Eventually, you'll be able to spin them into a structure, which then in turn becomes your story.

Your readers will want to continue through because the work will feel like one cohesive idea, if you've smooshed everything together well enough. You'll have hooked them.

I'm going to be talking about characters next week, which should be fun.

You can find me at my deviantart page, as well as my patreon. I’d appreciate if you dropped by and left a message or comment, or even bought me a cup of tea.

My patreon has a bunch of stuff even at the $1 level, including exclusive comics.