Search
It all depends on your intention. 1) You want your reader to be suspicious about the character, but not know the true explanation. In this case you can put spotlight on this character, show some m...
Misdirection is a common method. When dealing with shady characters, people tend to pick one to hate above all others. Snape was mentioned, and people loved hating him. He was a character that was ...
An interesting idea that no one has suggested yet is to simply break down normal nouns into more name like ones. For example, create a name that is associated with the character - if a character's ...
I beleve JK. Rowling (of Harry Potter) went to a local Graveyard (Greyfriars cemetery), to get inspiration for the names. http://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/voldemort-draws-harry-potter-fa...
Personally, as a reader, I'm not great fan of authors trying to match the name to the character's personality traits. It often feels very force fed and well, immersion breaking if used too much. On...
This is one of the great debates in technical communication. Do you need to be a technical expert or is it enough to be an effective communicator? Different tech writers, and different employers, c...
TL;DR You need to have a well-developed Character with a well-known set of Skills, who adheres to a certain Moral above all else. The reader must share the same Moral, or they will have no recour...
The best advice I can give is that your readers won't care about what happens to your characters if you don't. You have to want them to succeed when you write their story or it will come off as ge...
Almost anything will scare off some readers in some contexts. That does not make them wrong things. It just makes the things that appeal to one person more than another. No work of art or communica...
The part that is most obviously missing from what you describe is "why?" Character provides the why. But equally importantly, the why provides the character. A character is a person who would do th...
You can set yourself a problem and then set out to solve it. Similar to how a modern composer might choose a 12 tone row and then start working with it. When you do this, as you play with your ro...
I suggest we also have "The Expander" You asked for something other then "Plotters" or "Pantsers". I would venture to offer the "Expander". An author who writes notes and even entire unpublished...
Put aside the character for a moment, and ask yourself how you want the story to end. Then work backwards to your character. If she is, in fact, your main character, she will have, or develop, a go...
Another suggestion: use a heavily stylised phonetic language. The most extreme example of this I've seen is in a novel rather than a comic, Riddley Walker by Russel Hoban. The entire book is writt...
There are a great many systems for structuring the argument of a piece of writing. Each taking different approach to what to structure and how. Some to check out include: Information mapping STOP...
Harry Potter is not a wall of text. It uses line breaks, paragraphs, headings and chapters. thats the opposite of a "wall of text", which simply means "a lot of text without formatting, line breaks...
"Text wall" is a term that describes user-generated content in internet forums or on social media sites that take longer to read than the average eight second attention span of internet users. The...
A likeable misanthropic character is not necessarily a misanthrope at heart: he only needs to act like one. He is misunderstood. Perhaps just different. They could even be a good character who turn...
It's a complex sentence, with a complex structure and many adjectives. I, for one, love a well-constructed long sentence, so I won't suggest breaking it up. Try doing what the midwife does: recons...
Let's come down to your real issue: You are deleting your novel starts without even getting close to the end. You want to get rid of other ideas. They threaten to replace other ideas. what's co...
Many good answers already, and I'm certainly not an expert on this, but yet I think I can still add something I haven't yet seen, or at least not recognized, in the other answers: Tension and susp...
One Choice Cuts You Off From All Others This is a common problem for authors since many writers begin writing because they are interested in a number of subjects. However, spending a lot of time ...
J.K. Rowling's debut novel was Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. It was pretty successful.
Changing tenses can work as an exclamation mark. Particularly in denoting a mental process. In other words, using past tense and switching to present tense for action scenes is something I wouldn't...
I am in a similar situation, where I alternate between english and french (my native tongue). I know my english is not good enough to write an entire novel, but I often write short stories and exe...
