Posts tagged novel
Beginner here. So, I have tons of ideas for a novel, and in fact I want to write one (even a series), but I'm struggling a lot in actually starting writing the story. I have ideas for characters an...
In this article about different categories of heroes, Matt Bird states that sensitive and unlucky heroes are hard to write because audiences have a hard time caring about them. He says: "Americans...
I have been gathering ideas for a novel. The basic idea is in place; the story combines two different eras but the same place. How do I get the little details about the place, the people, their lif...
I am reading in a few blogs like this that the first page of the novel is really important if it has to get published. Is this true? Can a good story not compensate for an ordinary first page. I h...
How can I minimise the "filler" text that I end up writing when fleshing out a scene with detail? An appropriate level of detail seems to me to be a fundamental requirement for good prose. Whateve...
For example, let’s say the main plot is that the characters are on a quest to go find something. Can an author spend three scenes in a row detailing what happens on their journey there, even if the...
I am writing a detective novel and wanted to include two best friends who are working together. Eventually they fall in love but one of my readers said it's too boring and cliché. Is that true? S...
I'm coming up with an outline for a cyberpunk story. I want to establish (at some point) that the main character has marksmanship proficiency by starting my cyberpunk story with a VR sequence, in w...
In my sci-fi novel, some people have the ability to talk via telepathy so how do we distinguish telepathy from other types of communication? I would like to do it, because it's not the same, and I ...
In my story, 12 year old Ruth has visions from another place and time which lead her to gather a group of kids for a quest. She is told there will be 18 kids, but she can only find 17 with the spe...
I'm writing a novel with many POVs, and this is a very flexible story. It started out with a few POVs who had one plot, and now there is a lot more, having been integrated in between those previous...
So, I'm writing a novel where MC believes he is influenced in some way by an entity he calls Common Sense. He suspects (yet that is weaker than belief) that he is Common Sense's hand in this world,...
(Kem uses they/them pronouns.) I'm outlining a story about a witch named Kem who has to protect the world from evil. Kem befriends demons and other witches, but I don't want them to find a crush ...
The novel is in past tense and the character is recounting things that happened before the novel began. Should I be using the past participle? Everything I read says that using the word "had" is a ...
Background Woohoo! I literally just finished right now my masterpiece trilogy that I have worked on for what seems like, ages... I'm a bit vexed as to where I should write 'the end'. The epilogu...
I've finally committed to writing my first novel. I've been listening to things like Writing Excuses which encourages first time writers to finish their works, but I'm definitely writing an old dar...
"By the time I am nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least one hundred and fifty times. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Goo...
I want to write a novel about [something or other] and now I wonder if it is possible to do [this or that].
I have written my entire novel thus far in past tense. However, I feel like my final chapter/epilogue would work better in present tense. I want to give the reader the sense that everything s/he ha...
Specifically, I want to know about whether or not it's okay to start at a point that gives a little bit away. In my story, the main character gets captured and that's the point I want to start at a...
Let me open by saying that I wasn't entirely sure how to ask this question and stay on topic. This is my best attempt. I do believe this question will help other writers. As an author, I want to ...
Disclaimer: I am not intending on doing this. It is just a question I thought was fascinating and might be useful to other writers. Here's the scenario. You're writing a series of novels. After t...
My comic novel has a scene in which the hero is battling a monster. And at a moment of tension, where he's losing badly, there's a scene break in which the narrator goes into a brief digression. Af...
I am working on a series of novels and it didn't take long into writing the first one that I realized the need to do some more outlining. My question is how complete does my outline need to be bef...
I am planning a series of fantasy novels which will be told in linear time with relatively small time jumps. One novel in the collection, however must span several generations while keeping the sa...
Here's the set up. You're reading a traditional fantasy. Something is attacking the land of the elves. At long last the invaders are discovered, and they are... intelligent rabbits. My idea isn't...
I'm writing a novel in which the story is told from a first person pov. I don't want it to be predictable so I feel that if I kill the protagonist it will give it a sense of difference since they u...
In his book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, Orson Scott Card mentions the differences between fantasy and sci-fi readers, and even says that an author should stick to only one genre, as t...
Background Info: My main character starts out the story with kind of a sad back story, it's not in a tragic way, just the normal kind of misfortune; losing family members, having to drop out of col...
I've recently been struggling with a very strange problem in my writing: I can't find the main conflict in my novels. This has inspired quite a bit of thought and reflection on exactly what a main ...
This might be a stupid question but I am trying to write a small novel, and my structure just doesn't seem right. The text just flows continuously until the end of the chapter (with dialog being ty...
I am writing a novel with an ensemble cast. Each chapter is told from a different person's point of view. Some of the chapters are about a non-sentient machine that communicates with the human char...
When I was 14, I had an idea for a novel but never wrote anything. I'm now 24 and just finished participating in National Novel Writing Month (nanowrimo.org) where I wrote a 25k word "long outline"...
So in my latest works I've decided to make my narrator, whom is my main character as well, pretty unreliable. How do I get this across to readers? I read a few short stories online that were pretty...
I have read that a lot of passive voice deadens the story to 2 dimensional even if you are just trying to show something that takes time when you use the passive voice. I quite often use passive v...
I am currently writing a novel and am 25,000 words into it, but only about 10% of the way in total. My intention was to write a single novel, but as I write, it has clearly evolved into what I can...
I am writing my first novel and this the very first confusion I would like to clarify. As I am not a native English speaker, I find it very hard to understand the punctuation scheme in direct speec...
I'm in need of an idea to advance my fictional crime plot where the protagonists of a larger (~30) group realize that the murderer (of a single murder) must be one of them, someone hiding in the gr...
First question I've asked on here so hopefully it isn't a silly one. I am a little confused about a certain paragraph/dialogue convention I am using in something I am writing. Occasionally I have ...
I came across prologues of several novels, and I noticed that they all were different from each other. Some had a short excerpt picked somewhere from the novel, a few included some private notes fr...
I have this problem - I generally dislike fantasy worlds and science fiction set up in space or different planets. So I don't want to write about such things. I always loved more grounded stories a...
First thing you should know: I'm writing the first book in a trilogy and I'm at that beautiful moment where I'm ending it. I know exactly how I want to end it BUT there's one problem. I've been rea...
I'm thinking about starting a novel by having the first sentence be internal dialogue. What are the potential problems this could raise? What are the benefits? By internal dialogue I mean somethi...
My story calls for the main characters to break up for at least two years, before getting back together. (In this particular case, the breakup is for ethical reasons - the relationship began when t...
Accidents are a part of our real life. It is possible to see an old friend accidentally. It is possible to find a fallen comet accidentally. It is possible to kill someone by an accident, etc. Many...
After having waited for three months for the first draft of my novel to "cool off," I've finally decided to work on the second one. But now I'm presented with who options: 1) edit the this first d...
The core character in my current work-in-progress is an immortal goddess (of the minor kind), who goes increasingly desperate. In her desperation she's about to do something quite terrible, and the...
My (A)ntagonist (or antagonizing force) in my novel causes a nuclear disaster in a remote nuclear facility. I've decided on certain circumstantial plot points, such as the post-disaster coping of t...
