Posts tagged readers
I have recently started writing a fanfiction and I am posting it online as I write it. However, I often see in comments sayings 'This fanfiction gave me cancer','The writer of this crap should just...
Following up on my previous question, "How to make the villain's motives understandable if his logic is flawed?", how can I let the reader know that the lack of logic is on the character's side, in...
I wouldn't feel comfortable asking friends and family to read my work and getting their feedback. And I don't have an online platform to ask strangers. What are my other options?
In my current project my goal is to go for the following narrative style within scenes: Show only what the POV-Char can see, hear,... sense. Show their emotional reaction (through body-feelings, ...
(Warning, mention of sexual abuse!!) In the near future where humans have polluted and radiated the Earth so much that animals and plants have been going extinct at alarming rates and humans thems...
In this comments of How many elements can you focus on during worldbuilding? a conversation arose about the usefulness of non-genre savvy beta-readers. Another question Are "non-readers" useful be...
When I read people's manuscripts to provide feedback, I can easily identify areas worth improving. However, feedback isn't all that helpful if it makes the writer give up, so good news needs to be ...
There is currently a dearth of Asian American writers on U.S. library bookshelves, and those few authors who are Asian Americans tend to write about things associated with Asian culture. Think of A...
I've come across some answers and questions on this site which have gotten me thinking about re-readability. It isn't something that I think about much, but now that I consider it, I think it could...
Introduction I said a reader in the title. I don't know if I can answer this myself, as I'm not the kind of person who hates on something for not being good. I like virtually everything, and don't...
Background Alright, so my friends and English teacher recently found out that I've written novels, and asked to read them. So, I gave them out because I have plenty of self-confidence and really e...
Tokein. Jane Austen. Steinbeck. The greats of the past. I often come across people on this site and elsewhere who use the works of these great authors and others as examples and reservoirs of advic...
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...
My story involves a kind of plot-twist towards the end. The problem is that the one of the sources of the misdirection comes from a kind of "Story so far" chapter towards the beginning. It sets u...
I am a beginning writer. I would like to write a science fiction / fantasy book that is critical of psychiatry, including diagnosis inflation, the influence of Big Pharma, and the field's de-empha...
In a novel I plan on writing soon, the main protagonist (and indeed nearly everyone else in the story as well) is an elf. Humans are present, but they are far in the mountains, living in disorganiz...
I am writing a series of interconnected metafiction stories revolving around epic fantasy tropes. The basic premise involves gradually building up an epic narrative and then breaking it down, and t...
A story I'm working on features a "slow burn" type romance with a long build-up. The arc begins with (what's mean to be) obvious attraction, and proceeds through a long period in which the female p...
I have a project I have been working on for many years. It is quite personal and is intended for a small audience. In the story, the protagonist is trying to find/help another character, who for ...
In my story, there are two characters: a schoolgirl and a strange person with a creepy mask who gives her a tour in an art museum at night. Well, actually there is a third character; the boyfriend ...
(I hope this is sufficiently on-topic - couldn't find anywhere else in Stack Exchange more suitable...) Currently I am having to do a lot of reading of academic papers - some dry stuff but not exc...
I have given multiple things I have written to a friend of mine, who is something of a writer himself, to get feedback on them from him. One of these was a piece of mystery-style fiction, and the ...
My beta readers are family and friends - people who read a lot, but do not write. They are people whose opinion I trust, and who are genuinely trying to be helpful. (And I haven't found a writing g...
(For reference, I am not white. I've asked another question about race here). So I'm pretty far into writing my dystopian novel and I was reading over what I had. Something that helps me when I ...
As a creative writer in my free time, I sometime suffer from a lack of feedback. To get some impressions on what I've written, I either have to ask my girlfriend (who acts as a sort of beta-reader)...
Suppose an author is writing a novel. The novel has nothing to do with politics, our society, or any of the hot questions of the daily news. It's, say... maybe a fantasy or sci-fi novel, set in a c...
So, in my post-apocalyptic novel, the world was caught up in an international war (basically WWIII), and all the world's nuclear superpowers launched their warheads and killed much of the global po...
I've long believed that for a novel (or any kind of fiction) to have a certain weight or power behind it, there must be a message. I've been writing this why for many years, and it's lent my fictio...
In the context of writing a fiction novel, how to make sure that readers remember several of the incidents or events or even characters that were described in earlier chapters, when the same gets r...
Say I want to work on a game and, since I'm not very good at creating games yet, I want to work on the story first and foremost. Before I even want to commit to creating the game, I want to do get ...
I intuit that hooks are things that hook. (I'm quite astute in this way.) They can be good prose, relatable characters, rich settings. Books must start with a 'hook.' This is a current truism. The...
I recently started writing a blog. It's about many things: travel, food, my perspectives, photography, comics, movies and whatever thing I feel about writing. I'm using a WordPress blog. Since I'm ...
I am in the process of editing a short story. It is science fiction of the "if this goes on" kind: I take a social trend I see, and paint its event horizon - a troubling future. 1984 and Fahrenheit...
Premise: I believe that breaking genre expectations can alienate readers. If you go into a book expecting one thing and get another thing out of it - especially if that other thing is the complete ...
If someone asks me to be a beta-reviewer for a book and I had to write a feedback for it, how should I organize the text, what do I need to do to not offend the author and give constructive feedbac...
I've never written for anything other than personal enjoyment or for a predefined context before. I have ideas and partial drafts for several books and want to finish at least one this year. My co...
In my post-apocalyptic novel, the MC Eris navigates the world of survivors and grapples with her newly discovered abilities. The leader of the group of survivors, and the book's antagonist, Ezrith...
I am talking about writing a sequel to a novel that's in the public domain. For example, Wizard of Oz. As far as I know, this is completely legal; however, the issue is how to deal with the fandom ...
So I've got this fantasy planet X, where humanoid peoples Y and Z are at war on an island nation about the size of England, and they've been at war with each other for hundreds of years. They are ...
A short story fairytale that I've been thinking about writing and plotting out has recently given me pause. It focuses on a witch and a princess who both cross faeries, but it isn't by any means f...
(Another post-apocalyptic novel question! I'm just full of them.) My MC, Eris, has the power to manipulate life force. As a child, she accidentally killed her family and other survivors who inve...
(Edit: I feel like I should clarify, these are the only LGBT characters in the story, and the only characters whose sexualities are even touched on, and they are part of a larger group of people, a...
I'm looking for ways to build early reader investment in an unlikable character who "learns better," but not until fairly late in the book. In particular, I'm writing a first-person middle-grade n...
I'm considering writing a fantasy novel. While I'm striving to make the world as original as I can, and not rely on many of the popular fantasy tropes, for the purposes of this question you can ass...
In my opinion, the best beta readers are fellow writers, partly because they may have insight others don't, but partly also because you can agree to trade beta-reading responsibilities. (This is fa...
I started a book and although I wanted it to be dark, will the readers find it too dark if the characters almost never win? Or are a lot of readers into that? In my book the two main characters' wh...
The main character, while playing an MMO, was teleported to another world in her avatar along with all of the NPC's in her guild. As her reaction, she sent scouts around the area in order to discov...
I'm writing a novel. At 56k words, I've become a little nervous about how I've been building the story. BACKGROUND: I started this book with the introduction of the main character, Jules and a br...
Background: I know to avoid Deus Ex Machinas - meaning to me a sudden and unexpected solution arriving out of nowhere to save an otherwise unsolvable problem. They are often indicative of a writer ...
This question sounds similar to this but I am asking something different. It is said that Stephen Hawking removed all the formulas except one because with each use of a formula the readers of boo...
