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Travel stories are about the longing for something with a counterpoint of fear of the unknown and its dangers. To make your story interesting, find the object of longing and find the the source of ...
Do ends justify the means? The very fact that he acts just like the regime he wants to overthrow is punishment enough. If he realizes it early on, he may choose not to act, thus not overthrowing t...
Although the following might seem obvious, some of the things I tell my students include: don't use 'then'. If you have written it well one thing follows from another. Secondly, avoid starting sen...
Your problem is that you don't know your character. Until you know what drives the protagonist, you can't know his obstacles and so you can't establish the tension you need. I had a book recommend...
It sounds like you are missing two major parts of story development: Character and Stakes. These two topics could fill two small books, so I'll try to give you the run-down below. The purpose of ...
One of the first things I thought of was temperament. Have you given each of these characters a very basic template for their temperament? This also has the added benefit of providing a tangible le...
You could use different spellings and punctuation depending on where the email originates from: favor vs favour; and inclusion, or not, of the oxford comma. Some people write 'try and' instead of ...
Well, the Anti-Hero needs punishment. The new order that rises up in the wake of all this destruction could hold trial against him and imprison him for what 'sins' he did commit. I'm not sure if th...
No. The familiar information should be placed first, and the important new information should be placed last. These two positions are the most prominent places in a sentence. And placing familiar i...
I think you mean "errors" rather than "errata". A book's errata is usually a list of errors that have been noted and are corrected on a separate page. You don't see errata so much these days—it's c...
Any word other than said draws your attention to the tag and not the dialogue. This is creative writing 101. I am twice published and working on my third and I have never had a reader, reviewer or ...
I started out refusing to write a trilogy. I enjoy reading series, but I sometimes think writers like Christopher Paolini just needs a better editor who was willing to trim his series down into one...
I would suggest working backwards following completion of book 1 after outlining book 2. This of course requires you to finish book 1 and make alterations before going into query mode (or self pub...
If your work is nothing but message, it isn't a novel, it's a polemic or an allegory. And reading the same polemic or allegory over and over would be excruciatingly boring, because there would be ...
Oh God! not the dialogue tag debate . . . again. Firstly, those who believe 'said' is the only valid dialogue tag and dialogue tags should be invisible are misled. It's fine if you don't write a l...
The theme (I think that's what you're talking about) is something that is often part of a novel, but it's not part of the plot at all, if that makes sense. The theme is also not the concept (a va...
I would say as the two variables named c are not part of the same field. Even if technically acceptable, any form of cs is hard to read. Italics applied to only one letter, especially a roun...
Brandon Mull has a very well-paced narration in his series Fablehaven. In the book Kendra and Seth have to get used to this new side-of-reality. While Kendra and Seth are in this preserve(land in t...
I don't think you need to fear compatibility issues moving forward with Word, as it's more or less the business world's linga franca of text document file formats. And even if it goes belly-up, th...
Tough question--especially if you've never experienced that type of thing. You might get quite a few suggestions here. My own conclusion is to say that, by the end of the book, the reader wants th...
If I had a formula for what makes a book a bestseller, then I'd have a bunch of bestselling books to my name instead of the lame few hundred copies my books sell. I think the biggest factor in mak...
It seems you're using the term setting in a non-standard way to mean genre conventions. Given that, I would say that a mastery of genre, including the fulfillment of the expectations of the core a...
If I am limited to Writing and Setting as you describe them, I have to choose Writing. Because I think a fine story can be written in an unsurprising setting, about lawyers, or love, or comedy, or...
IT will be confusing for some people. But are you going to use indicators to set them apart or just let them figure it out? Also, is that scene order going to be same throughout the entire story or...
Why do you believe you have too much dialogue? To take the question to an extreme, have you ever read a play? It's all dialogue, and yet plot happens. Now, I understand you're not trying to write...
