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I know this isn't the conworlding forum, but I'm not asking for a critique on my conworld. I'm asking how people would receive such a thing as a constructed world not based off of ancient cultures,...
What you have done so far is to create a history. A history is fine, but it is not a story. A story is a drama and dramas have a specific shape. You can think of a drama as being built around a cho...
Get cozy at your local library. Before the internet, this is where we all did our research. As long as it's a well-stocked library, there should be plenty of books on the basics of explosives. U...
First things first: let's get our terms straight. DISCLAIMER: I understand that most of my quotes come from Wikipedia. If you find a better source that succinctly explains the terms and makes sens...
If the technology was transported from the future to the age in question, it might be considered time-travel sci-fi. If the technology was developed in the Medieval period independently of temporal...
You are not writing a history, you are writing a novel. In a history, the temporal sequences of events is generally the mainspring of the narrative. In a novel, the story arc of the protagonist is ...
You were right about your own taste. You may have been right about the taste of many other people as well. But as a general principle, you were wrong. Fiction is fiction. Fiction is all the stuff...
Why don’t they simply judge each story based on its own merit? Why do they want your publication history? Of what relevance is it to the story itself? I ask this because a suspicion has been growi...
Alternative history can allude to history and make the reader think ‘this sounds a bit like the Great War’ but the names of the countries have been changed. That is fine, but you need not do that. ...
The advantages are not losing a large proportion of your audience, and not being accused of being a racist, a liar, a hater, a bigot, an ignorant writer, etc. If you use a real country, there will...
I set "levels," and don't include technology beyond the level. Often I only research a word, in an online etymology dictionary, to see when it originated. e.g. "linen" comes from "linum" which is t...
I'm not sure I understand exactly. I guess you are not telling a time-travel story; so this sounds like a long flash-back. If it is a romance, I think you destroy much of the suspense in a romance ...
I come from worldbuilding.stackexchange because people suggested I post my question here: My story shall take place on Earth with the human race as the dominant species. I imagine the technologica...
The short answer is yes, you can include this type of material. But it really depends on your audience and the scope of the book. You may not want to do it. If you're writing a very fact-based f...
As a life long player of the best known 4X game, Civilization, the "story" of the series is the rise to power of your "empire" and much of the play is about becoming the strongest world power on th...
You first described it as "set in the late 1920s", and then later said you were "writing pseudo-historically in an alternate universe". I'm not bringing this up to nit-pick your question but, rath...
Stories are the way human being make sense of life. They are an attempt to impose order on the chaotic stream of events that we experience day to day. History is the interpretation of the stream ...
I would like to try an answer that overlooks the contentious term 'subtext'. Regardless of its meaning (or meanings) in literary theory, the truth is most amateur writers (in the sense of writers w...
For a video game: One approach to being post-racial is to just have racial mixing. As many cultures today are, due to migrations (forced by slavery or not) and inter-mixing of genes. We have had t...
Prologues are something that need to be handled carefully - otherwise, you may wind up giving too much information about a character/world that the reader doesn't care about yet. If you have a lo...
My approach to that is, for letters to the POV character, do not forget that you have a human reading. Mechanically, I indent the letter like a quote. (Say your normal margins are 1-inch left, 1-i...
What strikes me most about your excerpt is that you're speaking in vague generalities, which on their own feel somewhat bombastic. "People have given up," there is "an unarticulated notion of defea...
Wikipedia's Definition of High Fantasty Genre: High fantasy is defined as fantasy set in an alternative, fictional ("secondary") world, rather than "the real", or "primary" world. The secon...
Between the brief ordered spreadsheets @Liquid suggests and the detailed but time-consuming wiki you suggest, there is a third way: keep notes of what you need in a semi-organised way that is conve...
I'm reading the question with an eye toward language rather than to the actual intent or ultimate purpose of the declaration you're considering, Becky. In other words, my answer has nothing to do w...
