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You found a time when you can write. Why on earth would you want to break that habit? Fix your grammatical errors in the morning. Get your ideas on paper when the Muse wants you.
I think if you have repeatedly and deliberately "worked together" at your request to create and answer various writing challenges then this is co-authoring. However, if you ran a couple of issues ...
You could use symbols and motifs. This sounds very obvious, but like all literary techniques, if done well it works. It could be the use of the colour red. It could be the mention of a poetic work....
"Write what you see in your head"? That first takes observational skills. What are you seeing? Are you seeing all of it? Are you also listening, smelling, tasting, feeling? Are you observing your (...
It's not unheard of to do this, but I wouldn't recommend doing it at the beginning of your book. Give the readers time to get to know the characters, then you can cut to a kind of short-hand betwee...
Even bad writing requires skills. I read my earlier efforts and think how badly I suck, so I edit and move on. Often, I return to revise my revisions only to wonder why I had changed my initial dra...
Oooh, i liked this question. Basically, for fantasy novels, i believe that readers expects epic battles between huge armies, they expect a deep lore, fantastic new creatures, fantastic new places...
As you say, there are many stories that work that start with dialogue. Far too much advice about writing is much too mechanical in nature. Dialogue is just a mechanism for telling a story. Rules ab...
As a reader, I'd rather not have a story start with dialogue, and it's more about background and voices rather than context per se. Why? I create particular voices for characters in my mind when I...
It could be both. "Coming of Age" describes how a young person puts aside childish wants and needs and accepts adult responsibilities and priorities. "Redemption" can happen at any age, and desc...
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 ...
The answer lies in our ability to define 'God'. Note that while we talk of God, we are personifying an all-pervading aspect; and sometimes the language in which we write or speak becomes insufficie...
With respect to the `no story arc' issue, there is a certain amount of latitude in frustrating the desires of an omnipotent being, as per the following dialogue by the logician Raymond M. Smullyan:...
Philipp provides a good answer, but I think there is more to say. First, "show don't tell" has kind of become the touchstone of all advice about storytelling but it is good to remember that it or...
I would start by "showing" what the guards are up to in the eyes of one of the plotters...then connect this vision to the eyes of another plotter who sees the same thing...thus "showing" without te...
I don't see anything wrong with the construction per se. It's just how English works for a structure that is action followed by consequence. It is far more important that your prose should seem nat...
There's a few sites where you can offer your services. Check out Fiverr.com and upwork.com. I've worked with several editors on Upwork before. Also look for local writers groups. Although, that w...
I think chapter titles are one of the elements that contributes to the sense of a strong narrative voice -- that is, the sense that there is a narrator telling the story. This style is somewhat unf...
A table of contents is helpful guide to any reader that wants to backtrack to a certain point in the story, perhaps to remind themselves how a certain event occurred, or see again how a particular ...
Patricia Briggs did almost exactly this in her Mercy Thompson novel Frost Burned. The series overall (this is book 8) is told in the first person from Mercy's POV, but in two chapters Briggs shifts...
I was planning to do this when I start with the other character's POV and somehow explain how she was able to see things from his eyes when she wakes up, but there is a problem with that pla...
Is it possible to make a living as a novelist? Yes, a few people do. Is it sensible to plan on making a living as a novelist, the way you might plan on making a living as a dentist or an accountan...
Yes, authors can make very good livings. I personally know a number of self-published fiction authors who earn well into six figures a year. Quite a few of them earn seven figures a year. This year...
Your font doesn't matter. Publishing industry standard is 250 words per page. From the Editorial Freelancers Association: The industry standard for a manuscript page, however, is a firm 250 wo...
If you have access to Linux or Cygwin on Windows, you can get it to tell you just about anything you want to know about your text with a few lines of shell code. Here's one approach. Here's anothe...
