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One of the most touching scenes in The Lord of the Rings reads: And so Gollum found them hours later, when he returned, crawling and creeping down the path out of the gloom ahead. Sam sat propp...
I used to have the same issue. Even if I planned ahead of time, I would read again my previous session and find myself editing it. There were multiple reasons for that. First, in between sessions I...
Do you actually need to write longer narratives? A sparse writing style can often work well. Here, every word is important. You must carefully choose what you say and how you say it because you ...
Coming from a very short, scene and dialogue oriented style, I struggle with this too. I'd argue that sometimes you want brevity and a few quick lines of dialog between two characters are all that ...
I am a discovery writer; and one that completes novels. The key here, I think, is to remember you are discovering the story. If you are in the middle of the second act, then you have discovered h...
Readers will buy anything, if you can sell it. Vampires, wizards, talking animals, superpowers, sentient flat figures... Readers don't look for a realistic story. They look for a good story. Any pr...
I suggest you continue to write however the words come out. Because the last thing you want to do is feel like you can't write unless it's perfect (or better). Every day, go through a paragraph o...
I don't care about pronunciation, because I rarely pronounce even semi-common names correctly. I have trouble with even some of my own characters' names. But then, for me, written language and sp...
Hard-to-pronounce names suggest a different culture. If War and Peace had its characters named not Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky and Pierre Kirillovich Bezukhov, but Andrew Bolk and Peter Bek; or i...
While it's going to vary between readers whether it bothers them or not I have to say I'm firmly in the camp that it can ruin immersion. I'm not too worried about whether I "pronounce" a name "co...
I don't think strange names break immersion; I think names that cannot be sounded out (correctly or not) break immersion. "Hermione" can be sounded out. "J'xyx'brtl" is too hard to sound out, and ...
For symbols to work, they need to be understood. Think of symbols as a language; if you speak the language, and the readers speak the same language, everything's good. If, however, you speak the la...
This is a chart of the stars in the Ursa Major: And here, straight out from Wikipedia, is an explanation of the name "Tania Borealis", given to the star also known as Lambda Ursae Majoris: I...
In human languages, most translations of the Earth are just "the Earth", or "the World", or "the Land". Once in a while, you will find a proper name ("Gaia") of a God, or a reference to a God ("God...
We cannot tell you what to write or help you brainstorming - that's your task as a writer. However, we can try to assist you with how to brainstorm. It is very helpful, looking at a situation, to ...
As far is legal rights are concerned, no, names generated by a generator are not copyrighted, nothing similar. Consider: a random string generator producing random letter combinations of random len...
I find them helpful, but often wrong. I used one that has different ethnic groups to get ideas for names. Always always Google the name that comes up. Some of the "girl names" turned out to be...
I imagine that there is a broader issue with the style of such summaries. I'd suggest reading abstracts from articles on the subject. The journal typically imposes a strict limit on the number of w...
People who call themselves experts aren't usually experts. Those bloggers bragging about how they just put a book on Amazon and it sells like gangbusters? They're leaving out part of the process....
NOTE: I am answering the original question about surprise endings. As a general rule, surprises and twists are welcome. Readers enjoy predicting the outcome and we don't always like to be right. ...
Using semordnilaps is indeed common enough. TV tropes refers to this trope as "Sdrawkcab Name". You can follow the link for multiple examples across media. A particularly known example is 'Alucard'...
You're the writer, you can do whatever you want. It's common to use symbols to refer to people, places, things, and so on. The question you want to ask yourself is, does your reader know what t...
It all depends on your perspective. Yes, some elements of the author's life, personality and way of seeing things make their way into their writing. No, a work of fiction is not a biography of its ...
Yes. If it's done well (which is going to be harder than it looks), it can work. A narrator with opinions isn't so uncommon (The Book Thief is a good example) but characters that talk back, well ...
It's a bit dicey. You'd have to have a good reason for it. If Preston's POV is in the present, but Paola's POV is in the past, is the story happening in Preston's time? Is Paola relating things ...
