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Elves and dwarves are all over fantasy fiction. Here's one compilation found by Googling "fantasy novels with elves". They are generic mythological creatures. If anything these tropes are overus...
I would put the quotes in the link, because the quotes are around the title of the article and are therefore part of it. The CSS formatting is a question better asked on Graphic Design SE.
I recommend keeping quotation marks outside of the link, unless they're part of the title of the work. So you'd have this: I was reading the story "Flowers for Algernon" when the doorbell rang...
The key is in what "as were the others" refers back to. It's not just "the chairs." It's not even that "the chairs were upside-down." It's that "the other chairs" are in a specific state of being...
Your real problem is that you have dialogue, and then the narration immediately after it tells us what the dialogue just said. Remove that bit. If we don't know that John's legs are on the table (...
As long as the intervening text doesn't confuse any reference to the second element, you're okay. I wouldn't put the two items too far apart, but your first example is still perfectly clear.
In printed books or journals, figures and tables are placed on the same double page as the first reference. Where exactly they are placed depends on how their placement affects page breaks. Typeset...
Technically, they're both grammatically correct, though the sentence flows better using couldn't have been and should've been.
Excellent writing is one of the primary selling points of some games - but it is by no means necessary. It can even be counterproductive in some situations. There has been research into what aspec...
There is a story that in the early days of Fonzi from Happy Days, a network exec said he wanted The Fonz to lose his leather jacket cause it made him look like a punk. The head writer agreed, but ...
(As @ChrisSunami said, the author should know more than the reader does. I am writing about what to include in the text) The question is reversed. The proper question is "What information about ...
Presenting an antithesis well, in a story, can be difficult. Most people tend to think in terms of protagonist and antagonist, or even two opposing forces. While this is correct to a certain degr...
Delete it ruthlessly. As writers, we are often addicted to the clever phrase (or the phrase that seems clever at the time). But we succeed or fail not as crafters of phrases but at tellers of stori...
I'm going to echo the leave it for now finish your story crowd. It might actually work later if you can work it into some payoff in the future. I always like to point out things like "Hot Fuzz" ...
It doesn't really matter how much more experience he has than you: if he's asking you to testread, he presumably wants your opinion as a reader. And this case, he didn't provide enough detail for ...
I don't agree that relatability is one of the most important aspects of a good story. Yes, you want the reader to be drawn in and to empathise with the character, and to feel personally hooked int...
Relatibility is more like understanding why people are doing what they are doing. Consider the movie franchise for Taken: the hero kills dozens of people without mercy. But we understand why, they ...
I think you don't need to put so much effort into making characters relatable. Especially for certain genres where one of the biggest appeals is escapism. Sure, relatability can be helpful, but I t...
It is extremely firm, but not inviolate. The true issue is time. To fit into standard commercial slots you should be UNDER 120, unless you have written blockbusters in the past. Here is a graph of...
People who are way more successful than I am tell me this: Once you've published approximately ten books, your sales go way up. The reason is that you now have ten ways for people to discover you....
You might consider discussing why a hood is or isn't appropriate. For example, you could point out that a hood is used for stealth when trying to hide your identity, but it may actually interfere ...
This is really a matter for personal preference. There's no provably right answer. Personally, for my books, I didn't worry about the index until about the 4th draft. When I was basically happy wi...
I've done it both ways, and have found that a hybrid approach ends up working best. Doing it at the end means you can focus just on indexing (not writing). You're more likely to be consistent in ...
The lines should be interrupted. I open a random page in a best selling sci fi novel to find a dialogue, the author has whole paragraphs between utterances. Open Harry Potter to find a dialogue wit...
I don't think this negatively affects story progression. It can even be a form of emphasis, that punches the reader. Say Karen and Lyle have been married for ten years, with two children. Karen ha...
