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Sex or gender are just a small part of who your characters are. If you take all the female characters from contemporary literature together, they don't have many things in common. As with all thin...
Definition I think a good definition of cheesy is this: Something that is low quality, amateur, but is trying really hard to be good. It's a hard word to define for sure. Avoidance Beta ...
For someone who doesn't understand cheese, the easiest gauge is probably to ask yourself the following: "Why is this happening?" If you can answer this question from every angle (logic, science, ...
I think cheese, as you call it, is simply one aspect of work that is not morally serious. What do I mean by morally serious? In the literary sense, I mean that a work that is morally serious is one...
Understand what an accent mark is There are many kinds of accent marks. For example, the acute accent in French signifies that the 'e' is to be pronounced at the end of a word. This is the most co...
Accents are not decorations. Have a reason for using them beyond "I'm writing a fantasy and they look cool." (The same goes for apostrophes.) In addition to Daniel's very good answer: An accent ...
The normal process for a non-fiction book is to sell it first, then write it. The reason is that non-fiction books sell based largely on the author's qualifications, the soundness of the idea, and ...
Be careful with stereotypes. While us guys will, for whatever reason, go for the hottest-looking girl around, fictional or not, it may offend most female readers, especially if the stereotypes you ...
A subplot is a plot. As such, it has the same shape, the same components, the same effect as a regular plot. The reason you have a subplot is to provide thematic counterpoint of elaboration to th...
Subplots are generally thematically related to the main plot. They provide thematic elaboration or counterpoint to the theme of the main plot. If your subplots are doing that for you main plot, the...
Let me remind me you that your final novel does not need to include every bit of information you have compiled. The fact that you have additional information (like backstory) is beneficial to your...
When you cite from the Bible, Shakespeare, Homer, and similar texts, which are labelled by book and verse or section or chapter and these labels (and the text itself) remain the same across differe...
Here is the thing about point of view. People always position themselves to get the best view of something they are interested in. If they can stay in one place and see everything they want to see,...
The place where I work uses a home-brewed XML to HTML to CHM solution. We are reliant on the CHM's search engine (which frankly, is awful). We do not have a landing page, as much as a first page wi...
"That's not writing, that's typing." Indeed. I would not say that a first draft is necessarily bad. It likely requires some editing, but that might still make it hard to distinguish from the origi...
IANAL, but I personally don't see the issue... There are probably well over a million songs out there throughout the history of the modern era of music. Each CD has what 15 songs a minimum? If you...
Spend less time describing the nervousness, and more time describing what is making your characters nervous. Neither of them moved a muscle. Elias could hear his own heartbeat; he could even he...
They generally announce to the reader the beginning of a new story arc. I think that's about all there is to it. The format of a sequence of short story arcs that combine more or less loosely to fo...
Standard punctuation for an incomplete sentence is ellipsis. But don't. Don't have one character interrupt another at all. Dialogue is not speech and the page is not the screen. The page is an a...
Some advice I got when outlining my current project is that, in addition to outlining the plot and the characters, I can outline the plot hooks that tie each major section of the story together. Th...
It's also similar to Harry Potter and Divergent. Just as there was a rash of vampire/paranormal YA fiction after Twilight, there's currently a run on quasi-facist highly and arbitrarily segregated ...
Speaking as an American who has limited familiarity with any version, I suggest King James, because that's the one the general American public would hear the most in passing outside a church contex...
The choice is stylistic. It's almost always your decision, as the author. Do what you feel would be appropriate and convey your meaning well. However, it goes without saying that some publishers m...
As a student from the UK taking Religious Studies, we almost inevitably use the King James version. It's the most familiar to people in the UK, even if they aren't religious.
This gets back to a basic problem, in that there really is no such thing as The Bible; only translations compiled from various copies (which may or may not be consistent with each other). Using th...
