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Commas in dialogue indicate pauses. So: “You look after each other, okay, children?" "I'll have a sparkling water, please, sir." Interrupter commas (I'm sure there's a technical name for ...
Pauses in speech often coincide with grammatically correct comma placement, but do not necessarily do so. Using speech pauses as a rule for comma placement is a fallacy. To quote Grammar Girl: "...
Look at it this way: artistic license is granted by the reader. You are not entitled to it in any blanket way. Some readers will grant you more; some will grant you less. Generally, they will grant...
Having your own domain does not force you to have only one blog. You can very easily set up two blogs on one domain. It is likely that you have essentially three audiences: People who like tech ...
Purely a question of formatting aesthetics. If it's a personal story or you're distributing it, do whatever you like. (I would italicize everything, including the quote marks so they hug the ital...
I find combining words into sentences fun enough by itself to keep me going :) But, seriously, it sounds like you have a rich and interesting world developed, and that is a great accomplishment alr...
I think there are good arguments to be made that rhythm and clarity are closely connected. We tend to have a very puritanical view of prose preached to us today. It is all spare and bleached and sq...
One way to go about this would be to have the narrator and/or another character describe or comment on the character's looks in a positive way. If it's important to you to contrast this culture's s...
The trick that most novels use is not to describe what is thought beautiful in that world. In most novels, when a character is supposed to be beautiful, this is simply stated, and it is up to the r...
So if you want to create a culture in which overweight bodies are perceived as beautiful, you really don't have to be too subtle, because no matter how subtle or unsubtle you are, only the reade...
Does the story you're writing center around this idea of the concept of what is beautiful being different from what the current Western standard of beauty is? Or is this just window dressing and w...
Skinny=beautiful is a recent western concept, most cultures still see fat as healthy, beautiful, lively, or desirable and skinny women as diseased, ugly, barren, and close to death. Beauty is in t...
There are a lot of great answers here already, but I wanted to chime in with something that I felt was missing. If you want to show (not tell, as alluded to earlier in the Conrad / Kipling discuss...
Lots of helpful answers here. I'm adding one more as I think the suggestions which accompanied this quote... The show-don't-tell style that is so popular among aspiring writers today, forces yo...
I think the most important reason may be that it is one small step into faery. There is always something of faery about every story. Stories take place in a neater, stronger, brighter world than ou...
I think the main advantage of using a fictional place is what you perhaps allude to in your comment about "adaptability". With a fictional place, you can invent whatever you want that helps your st...
Ulysses does not support placeholders directly and there are no simple shortcuts that would create a placeholder. You would have to use your own implementation. For things to keep track of when u...
Thought verbs Chuck Palahniuk, an accomplished master of showing, suggested an exercise to learn not to tell. The exercise is to not use "thought verbs". Instead of telling the reader what a chara...
You don't have to write good arguments for two characters arguing opposite points in a debate, you need to write good characters. As someone writing a debate, it's likely that you will favor one s...
The Web is an open book. If you make a connection between two personas it is there for people to find. How likely are they to find it? That is very hard to say. But if you don't acknowledge the rel...
I can't see why, at time of writing, you would ever include a detail that did not seem apt and necessary at the time. Nor can I see why you would ever omit a detail that did seem apt and necessary....
If it interests you, this have been the subject of researches, notably by french literary theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes (in Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives) Barthes...
Stories are fundamentally about people, not places. The psychology of why we like stories has been fairly well worked out, and the archetypes of stories are fairly well understood. At its simplest,...
You could use a screenshot of the text message or messages. Doing so will give a more direct impression of seeing the message on a phone. The next best thing might be to place it in a text box (wit...
What you are talking about is called a Dark Protagonist. Short Answer: Yes. This is possible, if handled correctly. If handled incorrectly, your main character will fail and take the book with h...
