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I've been tasked with drafting the text for a memorial plaque dedicated to group X. Group X was big, diverse, and had several hundred years of rich history. Amount of space I have is 2-3 sentences....
In my own novel I have two settings: The (more or less) modern world with some historical backstory but 100% fictional characters. Set in the U.S., the country I live in. Ancient Egypt as based ...
It would depend on the scenario. I suggest you just write, let the changes to history that you make lead you and the reader to interesting places. The movie Fatherland has an interesting scenario ...
Formality of address shows more than just the relationship between characters. How one character addresses another does show the level of intimacy between them. But it can also show: Their hist...
In food writing, there is a specific sub-genre for works (both short and long) that are photo-heavy, with particularly good-quality photos. Food porn. Where you draw the line depends on your audi...
Just don't. You have a good ten thousand years of (semi) recorded history to choose from, in what is now hundreds of countries and multiple continents. There are many places and times you can pic...
Classes teach what study, experience and opinion believe to have produced prior success. Corollary, businesses prefer what has been previously successful. A sure win is money in the bank. If only ...
Galastel did a spin off question based on one of mine. Mortal danger in mid-grade literature. And hers has spurred a new one for me. This is an issue I've been grappling with for a while and I sti...
IMO, as a believer in Evolution, aliens cannot be that much different than humans. There is only one reality; in order to become an intelligent, space-faring race they had to go through much the sa...
I suggest obsession. I write little or nothing about my characters before I begin writing. But I think about them, a lot, often for a week or more. I think about them as I get ready for my day, as...
Just be aware that almost everything is trope/stereotype of some sort: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AlwaysFemale One of the best ways to mitigate that is to make sure there are MAN...
When you write in a modern day setting, you research the culture, climate, location and history of that setting. You can do the same for historical fiction or low-fantasy settings based on real pla...
I'm writing historical fiction which is set in ancient China. My MC is a historical figure who really did go into battle as a woman. Women in the ancient world were abused and mistreated. Males sl...
When writing a story, how do you find a good balance between the significance of different elements, such as plot, themes, and bold settings and characters, and the character arcs? In my case I ha...
Ultimately audiences don't need a lot of details about most characters' history, what they do need, in order for the story to make sense and be immersive, is justifications for their actions. If a ...
Yes, there is an objectively better place to start, and that is with character. This is not to say that it is the only place to start. As long as you put all the bits together in the end, it doesn'...
Study and compare christian dogma vs. actual history. In actual history, there is of course no "jesus succumbed to the devil's temptation" event, since these are mythological characters, but all th...
How and where you cite depends entirely on your audience. For school reports and academic/scientific papers, you use formal citations both in the body of the text and in footnotes or endnotes. Y...
I've written a short story about a true historical incident which involves a very famous person in history. The incident is true as are the people involved in it. But the story is a fictional eyewi...
How can a creation of your mind (a character) do something that you don't imagine? Implications. I will explain! What I imagine when designing my characters is scenes, things they have done in t...
This question was asked elsewhere by geneaux and is copied here in accordance with the CC BY-SA 4.0 license there. Right before the climax of my SciFi novel, there's a big reveal about who the b...
If you have placed your clues and foreshadowing well, you can present the final clues and let the reader draw the conclusion. You're aiming for an "oh wait, what? Oh wow..." reaction as the reade...
While emotions do show on the face and in the movement of the body, those are not the major ways that we judge people's emotions in real life. In particular, they are not the principle means by whi...
Shorter sentences have been proven more readable. Thus why didn't the authors below sunder their lengthy sentences, prolongated by commas and (semi)colons? Why not divide them into shorter sentence...
It sounds like you're describing an infodump (warning: TV Tropes), and that's a phenomenon best avoided. The issue is this: by your own description, the explanation is not interesting enough to h...
