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You will need two documents open at the same time, one on the left, one on the right. Let's say the manuscript in its current form is on the left. Now, on the right, jot down some notes about the...
People adopt pen names for all sorts of reasons. George Orwell, Mark Twain, and John Cougar Melloncamp all had pen names for different reasons. Realistically, there's no one that can answer this f...
This is merely my opinion as a YA(28) but I feel that you shouldn't have to worry about hiding who you are. 90% of the time I never even looked at the author's name of a book when picking one out ...
The contents of your book is the same, no matter what name you use. I'll like or I won't. So I should buy it or I shouldn't, no matter what name you use. Therefore you should use the name that make...
By their very nature, such templates tend to be specific to individual publications. For example, the general shape of a recipe is universal and well known, but the details like whether to include ...
I'd say it depends. The Jabberwocky used fictional objects, words, and creatures with no introduction and was a successful story. I'm not a professional, but I'd say typically stories have differe...
We hate those things that keep us from the things we love. If a character hates being a member of a wealthy family, it is because that family, or its wealth, or its responsibilities, keep them from...
There are two aspects to writing style: there is what does the best job of explaining a concept, and there are the shibboleths that determine if a certain group is going to accept the document. Unf...
Is this a comedic story or a straightforward/dramatic one? If it's a comedic story, then just run with it, because everything is supposed to be exaggerated. Your characters may not even have to no...
Setup. Setup. Setup. You can't force the pace in prose. Prose is always asynchronous with action because it takes more words to describe some things and actions than others, and because you can't c...
The question needs to be rephrased. Of course it is possible to write a story without any world-building. Here are some examples: War and Peace. Pride and Prejudice. The Autobiography of Malcolm X....
There is actually not a lot of point in describing what an option does, per se. What you should really focus on in both technical communication and interface design is what do you enable to user to...
Translator's footnote. * [Translator's note]: Dargo was using a heavy Tuvelarian accent, characteristic to the small, isolated rural settlements of Tuvelar. To reflect this, I'm using the Texan...
2. The one fundamental rule in scientific writing is clarity. Analogies, metaphors, and other figures of speech are never clear in their meaning but open to interpretation. When I say, for exampl...
When writing fantasy or any form of fiction that exists in a world vastly different from ours, try to imagine the text you're writing as a translation. Yes, even for your own main character. Rememb...
I feel like the conciseness of the explanation of the Flux Capacitor was to point out both characters' personalities and the mysterious nature of the device. Here we have Marty, who really doesn't...
Do you build on it? Sometimes the device is something your story needs, but doesn't need to dwell on; sometimes the story revolves around it as a central conceit. For example, let's take the powe...
I think there are two basic reasons for describing anything in fiction. One is to give sensual pleasure in its own right. There are all sorts of sensual pleasures that prose might convey, from th...
If you are drawing a house, and you want to convey a sense of the texture and detail of the building material used, you can draw three bricks in the middle of an expanse of wall. You don't have to...
In The Internet President: None of the Above, I create the equivalent of montage as a series of short chapters to cover campaigning for president. I enter each scene as late as possible and leave a...
I'm currently re-writing a story that was originally a screen play as prose. Two parts of the screen play are montages, each depicting the development of a stage in the relationship between two of...
You may try out Scribophile -- a community, where people review the texts of each other (costs USD 9,-- per month).
You might take a look at the book "The Fractal Prince" by Hannu Rajaniemi. It's the second book of a sci-fi trilogy... I happened to read it first, and found that it was really engaging in signif...
Such a story with no worldbuilding or little has made some of the great stories of our time. "No Exit" a French play by Jean-Paul Sartre is a great example of that. In a room with closed and locke...
London and New York are indisputable the places where English language publishing takes place. Traditionally, therefore, they were the places you needed to be to get the attention of a publisher. B...
