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What can I do when the storm arrives? The thunder roaring. Screaming. Shouting. The lightning flashing. Cracking. Burning. Battle waged across the sky. I crouch down. Shrinking. Hiding. Left behin...
Prove to yourself and to the world that you can write one decent book. Until then, there is not a lot of point planning a trilogy or a series. Until you can complete one book, you are not going to ...
To me, treat it like a job means two things, principally: First, set a regular work schedule and/or production target. Write from 9am to noon, or from 8pm to 11. Or else set yourself a word count ...
The language learning app Duolingo has tried very hard to make its example sentences entertaining. Perhaps I'm juvenile, but what works on me are: Ridiculous situations, such as "The duck is eati...
It largely doesn't matter If you can tell which of two versions of a piece is better, you don't need to be able to tell if either is good. You'll edit to the better version, and repeat cycles of e...
People buy books they way they buy vacations. The are looking for a specific kind of experience. There are certain elements that must be part of the experience. There are certain elements that must...
I'll offer more rambling thoughts, today being two years down the road from my previous answer. I still participate in the critique groups I belonged to two years ago, and I still find them valuab...
In the eternal battle between pantsers and planners, I'm a very hard planner. I don't feel comfortable writing the first page of a story until I know the overall structure and the main characters, ...
As an aside: There are proper and improper usages of the word 'and.' If the word's being used solely to lengthen sentences, there might be a problem. The purpose of the word 'and' is to connect p...
I've changed teams (and companies) since asking this question years ago, and the doc set is even larger on my current team. Here's how we manage changes that affect parts of the documentation with...
Handling realistic jargon that your readers might not know is similar to the problem described in Using real words from a foreign culture feels like 'Calling a rabbit a "smeerp"', a question about ...
Hello. Another angle to consider is that personal growth is easier to realistically portray through a series of try-fail cycles. There are multiple fails in Act II, and multiple successes. These ...
I've had a dig through the logs... When you updated your profile, the text you entered in the website field was pltavormina.com. The site is expecting you to enter a website there with the protoc...
A win in any contest in any field is valued in proportion to the quality of its entries. Winning a Pulitzer or an Nobel will do wonders for your career. Winning the Podunk County Fair Short Story C...
Based on your example, it sounds like you're looking for stakes in the form of "If (protagonist) doesn't help these people who need help, then (something bad) will happen." You want stakes in the f...
It seems to me that there are two types of worldbuilding question. One is about the literary craft of creating the story world in which every story exists, even those that are ostensibly set in the...
There are, fundamentally, two kinds of problem: technical problems and moral problems. A technical problem requires working out a workable technical solution. It is subject matter for a technical m...
Your readers are not going to imagine what LILLAHI birds look like. At best, this sort of technique calls forth the impression of an exotic location from their memory. For a westerner, for instance...
Setting is character. That is, setting functions in a story very much the way secondary characters function: it shapes and reflects the character of the protagonist, and it functions to propel the ...
You are right in thinking both that details are needed - they make the scene come alive, and that the details shouldn't be random. I use the scenery details first and foremost to set the mood of a...
I'm not giving you examples because you cannot ask "what to write" here. So these are guidelines on writing, given a character. I usually begin with a character. For me, a good character needs to ...
The new cultures stimulate the imagination. The problems are new, the ways of solving problems are new, what the culture allows is new. Perhaps the technology is new, or so old that we cannot use e...
To be honest, I think if you were to do this, you would not have one story, but two. One, the story of the world up until the villain wins, and Two, the story after the world changing event. So, ba...
Text Compression Compression of text is a lot like refactoring code. A lot of people here code, so maybe they'll appreciate this concept Abstraction A complex idea can often be represented by a ...
