Search
From what I gather, you have an idea that you imagine taking all of three forms: literary live–action audio-visual graphic Each of those requires a different investment of resources and differe...
Don't worry about it in your first draft. Wait until your second, possibly your third. Your first draft is to get the story down on paper. Then you let it sit for a month and go back. The second dr...
I am reasonably sure that you need to begin by selling the concept to a publisher, and once you do sell it, I am reasonably sure that the publisher is going to answer all of these question for you....
Storytelling is about sequencing. If you have a big gap between a detail and major events that depend on that detail, that means you have got the sequencing wrong. This is a pervasive problem in ...
I don't understand this fear of using certain kinds of words. Yes, you can use contractions. Yes, you can use adverbs. Yes, you can use "bookisms" (alternatives for said which give additional infor...
Speculative stories about God, or gods, can show up in the realm of speculative fiction, science fiction, or fantasy. Consider the following examples: Some of the stories in Wandering Stars, ed....
Look in the collections of stories you have on your shelves. Usually in the back of the book is a list of places where the stories have been previously published. If you're reading the kinds of sto...
Falling in love has the quality that you are often not fully conscious of it while it is happening. The moment where you articulate to yourself that you are in love with someone can often come as a...
Scanning the boldfaced terms on this page, I have to laugh aloud because it makes me imagine a novel about a crime investigation without a crime! That would be a most intriguing book indeed – and I...
The other answers are good but they strike me as abstract. Maybe I'm a philistine, but I like my advice concrete and practical. Different people naturally use different: Vocabulary Sentence leng...
Your characters do not need to sound different. Reading current fiction, I rarely can tell the characters apart by their voice alone. That is, if you take a page of dailog and remove all reference...
There are famous, well-respected writers whose characters all sound alike, so if the rest of the writing is strong enough, it might not even be a problem. But to fix it, the only real solution is ...
A common name for the kind of section you're describing in fiction is a "Codex". Specifically for monsters you could also use "Bestiary".
Start writing a diary. At the end of the day, you will be able to imagine and put down that stuff which you have already lived. That is just a simple trigger. Don't take it for easy because you wil...
What you're trying to do is called foreshadowing. Foreshadowing is essentially providing the groundwork for a later event. The typical rule that is followed is the rule of threes. If something is i...
There are no jobs that pay well for which the only requirement is writing. This is a simple matter of supply and demand. There are lots of people who can write well enough for commercial purpose. T...
I like to break up an event and reveal parts of it as the book goes along. It keeps the reader interested because you are giving them a different piece of the puzzle each time, without repeating yo...
I wouldn't put too much stock in it, especially if they're a Voice-Over Actor who only appeared in a decade or so. I would take a look at his acting credits i.e. which shows he's been on and look ...
You can show it somewhere in between your narrations, as if the character remembers that stuff or any incident, indirectly telling about it. A mention or a comic event is usually remembered by the ...
You can set a story anywhere. The challenge is not to make it consistent with our world but to make it self-consistent within itself. And I think this is a universal literary problem (and therefore...
From a purely stylistic point of view: "any combination of: apples, oranges, pears" But you say this is for a legal document and lawyers may construe ambiguity where ordinary reasonable people wou...
This is the definition of "your mileage may vary." Some people work better on paper; you are clearly one of them. I was blocked for years until I found Scrivener, which for whatever reason helpe...
WriteMonkey for the absolute minimalist, you can change it to a black screen and pretend to be GRRM. Otherwise word is fine, Im still trying to figure out the appropriate font. For screenwriting I ...
I am in my last year majoring in software engineering in the university and the recommended courses in the following may be useful for writing software: program design language, data structure, dis...
I know how attached I can get to my character names, especially since it usually takes me weeks to come up with them (no exaggeration), but as a reader I also know how little importance character n...
