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In an interview that I can't find now, Neil Gaiman stated that the short stories in his latest collection Trigger Warning had one element tying them together: they were all the short stories he had...
Are friendly writing contests a useful exercise? Yes they can be - not everyone is going to find them useful, but in the majority of cases it's more writing practice which is good. My writing ...
It depends on the context Code reviews can be done for various reasons and the way to write one it heavily dependent on the purpose. Some of the reasons you might write a code review: As part of...
Let's take a look at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields in the Lord of the Rings: First, we have the Rohirrim. Among them are Theoden, Éowyn, Éomer and Merry. Then we have Minas Tirith, with its va...
My personal opinion is that most fight sequences that involve more than a half dozen people will be too complex to describe in their entirety. When you need to do is condense the whole sequence do...
This reads completely normal to me and I don't really see anything wrong with it. If "tall" is what identifies the person in this scene it would be normal to use that if the narrator doesn't know...
In English, the dialogue tags you want to be using most of the time are "said" and "asked". "Answered"/"replied" is also OK. Those dialogue tags are transparent, as it where - our mind slides off t...
I am always surprised when aspiring writers ask this question. Because writers who ask this question forget their own reading experience. How do you decide whether you want to read a book or not? ...
YES, the first page is vitally important. But probably not in the way you think. Don't bring the "thriller" up first. The first page (and first sentence, and paragraph) is important in the same w...
You've already gotten quite a few good answers, but there's one important point that I didn't see in any of them: You can easily omit visual and aural details. If you don't want to tell the age o...
If you're trying to have it feel less like the second description is interrupting the first, I'd recommend pulling out the description of B (the classroom) and making its own paragraph, establishin...
Since you have said this is a pleasure project, I think you shouldn't concern yourself with inadvertently stumbling into someone else's definitions of crypto-racism. The story you are telling i...
In terms of the story, it should not matter. You might start with characters that you want to write about. And then figure out a plot to causes these characters to interact with each other. And t...
When reading answers to questions like this we should always keep in mind an annoying truth about writing: What works for one will not work for all. Even what works for many will still not work for...
A world with races (or species) so dissimilar from one another, without a continuum between them, ought to be racist. Subverting the trope, which is a trope in itself, is going to just flip the rac...
Welcome to the SE. What is the story? The gayest drag queen in the world would probably watch a story about the Vietnam War as long as it was done well. I'm certain there's at least one or two ...
I peer review many papers; half a dozen this year. If it is defined before the first use (e.g. "For brevity we use 'randvar' to specify random variables, 'logvar' to specify logical variables.") t...
"I am horrified to find..." whatever you are horrified to have discovered "I am most disappointed..." or maybe "I am shocked" or if the event you are writing about is worse you can say "I am appal...
When I was a graduate student teaching undergraduates how to write research papers, the real problem was over-quoting. Students would quote or paraphrase large amounts of other people's work and n...
I think any fantasy story benefits greatly from in-universe terms that have no meaning to a reader. It gives us the very distinct impression we're not in Kansas anymore. But I also think this is a ...
When in The Lord of the Rings Tolkien writes ‘But it is a heavy burden. So heavy that none could lay it on another. I do not lay it on you. But if you take it freely, I will say that your choic...
I sat for nearly ten minutes trying to decide whether to answer or not, because yes, this question is off-topic. On the other hand, how we physically write can influence what we write (keeping in m...
The short answer is yes, you can include this type of material. But it really depends on your audience and the scope of the book. You may not want to do it. If you're writing a very fact-based f...
The problem with your description doesn't seem to be the word count, but a lack of conflict. Sesquipedalias has the right idea - it feels like you've described something that isn't important to you...
If this character is unimportant to the story presumably the other character in the scene is more important, focus more on them. It seemed to her she would not be able to coax anything else o...
