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The real question is: boring to the writer, boring to the reader, or boring to the other characters? If the character bores you as the writer, either change the character or excise him/her. That p...
It is certainly very common to use a single parenthesis for an enumerated lists. For example, the Applied Geography Conferences Author Instructions say: Where lists are used, each item should ...
Because I said so myself, let me answer your question: No, you do not have to. If you look at the answer you linked to or at mine above, you see that they suggest techniques which aren't easy to ...
I think you should do both. You will, without question, catch things on paper you don't see on the screen. It just looks different. I don't know why, but many years of experience have shown me thi...
"Do I still need to follow these arbitrary word count limits". Firstly, no, you don't have to -as a self-pubber, you're the publisher and you do what you want with your book. Secondly, as a reader,...
My feeling is that you shouldn't add more words than the story needs to be told properly, regardless of how it's being published. Why pad it with garbage?
To take off on Lauren Ipsum's short, but excellent answer, you have three choices: 1) Re-write your current story so that your "cool" character is a key, perhaps main, character whose importance i...
Oh, so your protagonist needs to get to the store badly but his car is in the shop? This guy has a car and some free time. Oh, so your protagonist is after this girl? This guy is her brother. Oh,...
Same way you would with any scene break: double return, a row of * * * * * * *, whatever you usually do to indicate a scene change. Your "Hundreds of years later" makes the point.
If it is ok for your personal style (or specified company style) than yes, it is. Otherwise leave it. As I have learned it in school (and I'm from Germany so it does not refer directly to English)...
Since many books are written based on an advance to the author from the publisher, I imagine there's also a component of them trying to regain that advance earlier in the sales cycle.
Sparingly is good. Most commonly, a pair of parentheses is useful to set off a strong or weak interruption, rather like a pair of dashes or a pair of bracketing commas. As a rule we prefer parent...
I like what Theodore Bernstein says in "The Careful Writer" (original copyright 1965): There is some evidence that the use of parentheses has become more common in modern writing, particularly ...
Most of the time, the answer to this is structuring of the writing. I work in Software development, and you are right that a lot of technical documentation is appallingly overdone. The straightfor...
I am not a great fan of Writer Groups. I don't think a story should be submitted for critique until it is completed. Otherwise just a single critism will cause the writer to lose heart to a degre...
Frame It Appropriately Here's the issue: There's a pretty firm assumption that, the moment you're following a tight first-person (or third person) narration, you're following around in their head....
I think you are on the right lines, in that including contradictions is a good way of indicating that the person is not telling the truth. Of course, you need to avoid the danger that readers think...
It’s hard to give a useful answer to this question, because the vast majority of work submitted for publication is really, really awful. One editor has a “rough breakdown of manuscript characterist...
The AP is very similar to the Chicago Manual of Style, but much easier to use. Why go against the grain? You're going to reach the broadest possible audience with the AP, which I believe should be ...
I'm a language teacher in my native country and I do teach how to write essays. The structure is always the same: Introduction Development Conclusion Within the development, one should present...
Characters are people, just like you and me. We all have our own little biographies and memories that shape our character, define our personality and predict and explain our behavior. Some of those...
Speaking as someone who's gotten As on essays through the entirety of an American education, I would say that the answer is-- yes and no. That conventional scheme works very well, which is why it'...
Use text-to-speech software. It's available on almost every computer nowadays, for free. The advantage of this is that the computer is stupid and will read whatever you have written, even if it m...
Is it possible for you to practice Ernest Hemingway's advice of leaving some time between writing and proofreading so you come to it fresher?
I thought the obvious answer was this: Have someone else proof your work. No matter how many times I go over my story, a reader will still find stuff I've missed. They'll also find sentences that ...
