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Stories are not organized according to time sequence, they are organized according to narrative arc. A narrative arc is built on rising tension, not the passage of time. Narrative arc can often be ...
I think it depends on how your blog is setup. If the blog is one page that is searchable then I think your suggestion of once in the first paragraph is fine.
I agree that it's springing it on the reader a bit, but done properly it can be a powerful tool. An example would be a story about WWII told by a veteran. The main text of the story contains the ...
If the story was written in first person past tense, then a final chapter titled "Epilogue" would be perfectly fine. A present tense epilogue after a third person past tense story might work, but ...
The difficulty with adverbs falls to the familiar saw about "show, don't tell": If the adverb is instructing the reader how to interpret the action, the implication is that the description itself i...
If you need to introduce a new character to move the story forward, do it. Picking the flavor of POV is secondary, you can be either objective or subjective, the choice is yours only, and only the ...
If you are basically giving exposition in these extra scenes, it is an opportunity to switch styles. Instead of yet another POV character or just omniscient narrated events, perhaps these scenes ar...
Two methods I can think of: 1) The character says or thinks what he's understood. "So you want me to go to the hut in the forest and kill the wizard?" He listened as the elders discusse...
This is not intended behaviour. The zoom function should work the way you were expecting it to work. This is simply a bug. If you see such a behaviour and it is not solved by closing and restarti...
I can see several possibilities here: Don't worry about it. Perhaps your "overuse" of these words is simply part of your style. Or perhaps it isn't overuse at all. Ask a few good readers to read ...
I disagree with what's comment. There are certain techniques used in these speeches that help convey meaning. I'm going to use Martin Luther King's I had a dream speech in my answer. What kinds of...
To answer that, you've got to learn to read like a writer. (Or, in this case, like an orator.) You can study these speeches that impress you to find the answer to that question and to improve your ...
GLENDOWER I can call spirits from the vasty deep. HOTSPUR Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them? -- Henry IV, part 1 | Act 3, Scene 1 In other word...
Sure, why not? Get it on paper, kick it around a bit, and then hand it off to an editor to see if it worked.
No. It is entirely impossible to write a novel without using the word 'the'. I cannot even write that previous sentence without using that word, so I can say unequivocally that it is completely 100...
This is definitely a style question, where there's no one right answer. The only way I can see to answer it, aside from giving my own opinion, is to refer to the only experts possible in this type ...
It's entirely stylistic. In certain books neologisms will not be italicized, in others they will be. It's important to stick to it though and not change what you're doing. If you italicize one, be ...
You mention that you don't think that your problem words can easily be replaced with synonyms. Maybe not "easily" but I think the exercise of trying to substitute synonyms may aid your understandin...
We faced away from each other awkwardly, as if we were on the first date we never had. A hypothetical or conditional, not a metaphor. We faced away from each other awkwardly, portraying th...
The secret to writing is rewriting. If you aspire to math and computer science, try thinking like a scientist. (I am a research scientist using both math and computer science). A story is much lik...
When new at something difficult (let's use playing an instrument, painting and prose as examples) Any creative tool takes years of daily practice before it becomes "fun" For me; percussion perfor...
Many successful genre-bending stories are essentially one type of story in the setting of another. For instance, the original Star Wars is a fairy tale in space, and the early Harry Potter books a...
You submit what their submission guidelines tell you to submit, nothing more, nothing less, nothing different. If you don't follow the guidelines, they won't even look at you. And the guidelines ...
A blog can definitely build an audience for a book, and the existence of that audience can definitely help sell the book to a publisher, and afterwards the blog can help sell the book to the public...
I am assuming your animals have a world of thier own. They see humans as "others".(i.e They dont speak human tingue or interact with humans like humans do) First, let me tell you how not to write ...
