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Originality won't sell a book, it's a nice pretty buzzword that helps sell a book. Engaging the reader, crafting a wonderful tale, finding that emotional connection, these are what help sell a book...
Originality is almost impossible to achieve. All modern works of fiction have predecessors who have worked in similar settings, showing similar themes. Rowling may be the best-known example of th...
Originality tends to be judged retrospectively, it is at the best of times debatable and most people would agree that it its not something you can manufacture on demand. Similarly it is entirely ...
One example could be the Growltiger song from Cats. In the original staging, the song told the story of Growltiger's Last Stand - when his boat is swarmed by enemies and Growltiger killed. Immedi...
Yes for example There is a boy who has to find 7 gems to avoid a disaster in his town. And then we can include a folk story of how these gems were made or found. For example we can say a curse of s...
I kinda agree - it's a little jarring, even if it is only meant to be a verb, not a curse word. My personal opinion, a word that reflects the world specifically might be a better choice here, creat...
Remember that just because the villain doesn't know the hero --very likely in this scenario --it doesn't mean that the hero doesn't have a personal connection to the villain. Not only is this ofte...
The idea that The Villain knows the Hero that is coming for him does make for a much more dramatic entrance. One might as the author go so far as to put the Villain as a possible winner too...keep ...
I've seen it more than once. It can be a bit jarring, but it can also work fine. It depends on the plot and the writer. Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising pentology: the first book is about three ...
Not only can this happen, it's frequently assumed that it happens. You can't show two sets of events occurring at the same moment textually (unless you're doing some kind of weird formatting, and t...
Writing in the third person present tense, you want to depict "flashback" scenes or other past scenes in the past tense. That's fine. In fact, it clearly separates what was in the past from what'...
Ken is not in the basement or the attic, or anywhere near the upper floors. The garden? It could be, but it certainly doesn't feel like it. How can she feel it? Has she looked for him in any...
The readers must not be surprised by it. The marketing for the second book must make it clear what is going on. If you just say "The long-awaited sequel to Book 1", people will buy Book 2, but fe...
Mark Twain did this with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In "Tom Sawyer," Huckleberry Finn was the number two character after Tom. After they discovered $12,000 of gold together (a quarter of a m...
Consider Almanzo in the Laura Ingalls Wilder classic children's novels. He is a member of the cast of characters in most of the books. But somewhere along the line he got a book of his own, that ...
I think the question really boils down to: what/whose story are you trying to tell? And is it a single story? Look at Jim Butcher's Dresden Files stories, for example. Those are almost all cente...
I think there are two questions here. The first (the OSC one) is about the helpfulness of a given writer's advice on writing fiction. The second (the Paolini one), if I understand it right, is abou...
Generally speaking, "said" will be the most effective choice. As a writer, "said" might sound repetitive or too boring, but it's one of those few invisible words that the reader will just glide ove...
I would suggest a hybrid approach, keeping in mind the comments by @mbakeranalecta. How about only having certain chapters as diary entries? These would focus on the pieces where your MC has to sho...
A lot of slogans (and this goes for advertising as well as politics, since slogans are a sort of political advertisement after all) follow one of the following patterns: Three words are optimal in...
I would make a distinction between linguistic drift and anachronistic references. You cannot write a story about the middle ages in Middle English because no one speaks Middle English anymore. That...
First of all, let's define laughable. Summarising from several dictionaries, one can say it refers to something that makes you laugh because: a) it's amusing (which seems to imply something pleasa...
It is possible to accomplish this by divorcing the identity of the antagonist from their presence. If the antagonist has a presence (leaves notes, origami figures, small unicorn statues, a symbol...
Generally, the answer to a "can I do this" question is usually, "yes, it just introduces extra challenges." In this case, you won't have the typical advantages of a story with an unmasked antagoni...
There is no one answer to this because everyone writes differently. Some people have to outline every beat in every scene; some are complete pantsers. Every book is different too; some stories need...
