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Who is laughing? Just you, at suckering your readers into caring about a character? Maybe this is not how you read, but most readers are making an investment of time and emotional energy in imagin...
From a marketing point of view, books are classified according to the type of pleasure they give. Stories can give different kinds of pleasures. Some readers are more open to a variety of pleasures...
I write in a notebook with a pen. This way, I can't go back and edit anything until I've finished. This forces me to accept what I've written--it's only a first draft anyway. I'll fix it later, on...
Study a bit how cats (supposedly) see the world, how they behave, and so on. First of all, you should read a bit about cat vision. After all, you are going to describe the world from a cat point o...
Remember that all stories are told from a human perspective. Cats don't have grammar and they don't have stories. A cat's eye story, therefore, is an act of projection of the human into the cat. It...
I think I might be rephrasing what @MarkBaker says, but perhaps stating it differently would be helpful, especially since he seems to have attracted some antagonism. You're telling a story. What i...
A trope is a cliché setup; of any kind, that audiences have come to expect. An example in a commercial is the great looking guy catching sight of a jaw-dropping girl, dropping everything to approa...
I'm German. The process of submitting manuscripts is almost identical to the one in the USA. I assume it will be similar in Italy, too. What you are expected to do is usually: Find an appropriate...
If you are going to have it professionally edited, do that first before you do any other steps. These days, manuscripts must be 100% print ready before submission. A query is an introductory lett...
I can't speak to the Italian market specifically, but generally speaking the fiction market is totally saturated with manuscripts, most of them completely hopeless. This saturation means that it is...
Another italian non-professional here, ciao :) I have no experience in publishing, and I am going through similar questions myself. What I understood so far is pretty much what the others already ...
I myself did the same sort of thing. I was out of work at the time and wrote a novel as something to keep the mind working and active. I allowed a few people to read it and as I had some positive...
Generally speaking, a new Fantasy author will have much higher chances of being published if their novel fits an existing book series the editor is publishing. This is because selling a totally new...
I don't know why you say "an agent isn't in scope". An agent's job is to make sure you don't get cheated, and you will get cheated if you don't have an agent. As an author, you have no negotiating ...
The trick is to never humanise the character, and this may be done a little differently than expected. THe trick is to never let the reader get to close to them. As human beings we have a huge amo...
I suggest taking a few steps in order to abstract your identification with the character by one level: First, define the character by their traits and backstory (which may contain the reasons for ...
First of all, your question is about "what to write" rather than "how to write". Now (before your question can be put on hold), take a good look at your characters. What conflict of interests coul...
Yes, all writers are readers. It isn't clear what you are asking, however. We comment on other people's work all the time, particularly published work. If what you mean is why don't we review oth...
No. We always think of authors and other artists as people who were excited by some media experience (e.g. reading books, viewing movies, or playing computer games) and began a career in their med...
Like Loren's solution; I just use a separate document in another window (click "Window" then "New Window") which I normally have minimized on the task bar. I use LibreOffice too, my approach is jus...
In a first draft characters are where you need them to be, as many times as you desire. When writing the first draft, either I have planned it, and I know already where everybody is, or I haven't ...
I am not a lawyer, but No, you shouldn't use them. A unique invented name is copyrighted, and no in-story justification matters. The owners of the copyright have all the rights to make a profit u...
This is typically done in Anime quite frequently. Usually anime has a whole slew of main characters that each have their own tropes... and usually 1 of them are dark/were dark/converted/converting...
Evil is cool. Virtue is dorky. The pure hero really only exists in hagiographies and tracts -- works that hold up somebody's idea of political or moral virtue for admiration. Works of these kind ...
This is a case of "show don't tell", or for those that frown upon that phrase, I mean write about the effects of the fear. Fear reactions tend to be summarized in "flight or fight", which is a nic...
