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I despise "his or her." It's so bad, it should be unconstitutional. Randomly switching "his" and "her" from sentence to sentence is almost as bad. If you're making a general statement, and you t...
Chicago, MLA and APA all italicize book titles. Chicago and MLA "quote" journal articles, APA uses no markup for those. Since these reference list formatting styles are most common, I would adhere ...
Too long. Let's add some commas and trim the redundancies: As players move around the board, they buy, rent, and sell properties from and to each other, with each player trying to maximiz...
When you're done the outline, send it to me. If it's good, I'll steal it. Haha, just kidding, but seriously don't work for a year on an awesome detailed outline and then show it to just anybody o...
Find a good beta reader or a good editor. I ran into this problem myself: I had a plot which was solid and detailed but left room for expansion, I had characters I absolutely loved, I spent months...
Content and delivery go hand-in-hand. If one area is lacking, the other can't make up the difference - it's a bit like having a fancy cell phone but no service. A couple of beta readers or an expe...
Write a synopsis. Then get feedback on that. Your synopsis should be as brief as possible, conveying only the elements that are absolutely crucial to the story - the elements without which the sto...
If the scene is boring, it’s not necessary. Think about what you actually need to convey to the reader to move the plot forward, write something interesting that delivers that necessary informatio...
In addition to the always wise advice to omit the boring parts... Summarize the boring parts in a short paragraph. Maybe simply refer to them in passing. Complicate the terms of the negotiation u...
The other answers have shown how diplomacy can be interesting. But lets assume your question means that it is important to your plot that your characters are diplomats, but that their work as dipl...
A few possibilities: Tag Nicene with an utterly distinctive physical feature. When Shadow observes that physical feature, readers will know that it is Nicene. Give Nicene some tag phrase, and hav...
There are many stories where characters take on false names. In the dialogue, this person goes by the fake name. In the narrative (the part of the text not directly quoted from the speech of the ch...
My suggestion would be almost the polar opposite of Stephan's; I think you ought to try switching back to Nicene/Cherry's viewpoint, at least temporarily, very soon after she's found by Shadow. Wh...
I don't think you will find any tragedy for children found acceptable in these times. Grimm and Andersen got "grandfathered in" for being classics, even though they were rewritten in more "acceptab...
There are actually quite a lot of popular and critically acclaimed children's books with tragic elements. Many kids dislike these, of course: I remember despising Bridge to Terebithia as a child, ...
Read a lot of books with Guardian characters, and as you read, pay attention to your own reactions to the story. Then step back and ask yourself why certain scenes or paths of character development...
Maybe I don't understand, but (I think) the whole point of a Guardian is that they DON'T change, they DON'T undergo a journey. At least, classically. The hero is the one who changes, who undergoe...
While it is true that nothing you wrote specifically says it is a female narrator, I do think that the perception is of one, due to the attention to small details of a flower, and the inner dialogu...
I think there are two reasons you might be procrastinating on the scene: You are afraid of doing it wrong (in that case follow Lauren Ipsum's advice). It's boring and you don't feel like writing ...
Consider general problems/trends/concepts instead of specific realizations/models, then think up techs that resolve/accentuate the general ideas you started with. Techs here don't have to be elect...
The web has lots of research trade e-zines, with articles written by and for laymen, that would help you. Then there are magazines like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. Also magazines like ...
Joe Sacco, an excellent comic artist (printed, not web), does sometimes do “illustrated narrative” comics, where there’s quite a bit of writing in narrative form, not dialogue, but the illustratio...
IANAL but I believe that in the US, the author of an email owns the copyright to it, so if you reproduce someone else’s email to you in your autobiography, you have to either get their permission o...
No matter how different science fiction characters are from humans – whether they be extraterrestrials, artificial intelligences, or a far future species evolved from Homo sapiens – they must be re...
Some cultural changes over the past century or five have been very deep, and some have been shallow. It’s much easier for women to get divorced; that’s a deep change. They often announce those di...
