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Showing instead of telling means showing the consequences of a character state (anger, anxiety, love, worry, hate, etc) instead of labeling the state. "Steam coming out of her ears" is a cliché, o...
Well, within any discussion of literature -- any answer given on this SE for example -- there tend to be lots of ideas postulated. That is, simply, that they are taken as accepted truths by the wri...
A semicolon is a complex beast: You don't use it when you want an idea to stand on its own. You use a full stop for that. You don't use it to tie two ideas closely together because if you did, yo...
I think most people just FEAR the semicolon! Below is an excerpt from https://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon How to use a semicolon The most feared punctuation on earth. skipping over WHY...
I would inspire myself to existing chatbots These are just two examples that came to mind, I hope they help: Emacs psychotherapist a rather old one, asking questions on the previous statement wi...
I have no expert knowledge in this field, but I have a theory. This may be caused by 'your' personal experiences and how the context/content/atmosphere/vibe/word choice might remind you of certai...
Don't use quotation marks. They just look as if you don't know what word to use. It makes you (the author, not the narrator) look lost for words. That's not your intent. One option is to change t...
You absolutely can publish your book with CreateSpace and NOOK at the same time. Each print version needs its own ISBN. I wrote to B&N about this exact issue, and this was their response, emp...
Watermarking. This is common with high-priced (>$30) documents, such as building codes and scientific journal articles. The downloaded file will include "Purchased by [email protected]" in the f...
Is there a practical, effective way to prevent this IP theft? Yes. As someone who has pirated countless books, I might give you some insight into my frame of mind. There's a very simple way y...
You do it as you did, they just need to be short and pithy enough that people get what they are; slang or shorthand for something ridiculous or over the top. I would read them out loud (in my studi...
It is sad but true that without strict enforcement of anti-piracy laws, and in the absence of broad cultural perceptions that consider the act of acquiring and reading a pirated ebook as either cri...
"I can't come up with anything good or worth reading." This implies you have ideas, you just think they're bad. That's irrelevant. You must write. Do you honestly think an artist just hap...
There are lots of things that push our creativity to the side or that bring it back on full force. Stress. I guess you are in your early 20s? Maybe you're finishing a degree, or starting a job, ...
I do not have enough knowledge about the book-reading community as to what pleases them. What pleases them is what you see published and sell, they wouldn't buy it and read it if it did not p...
At the core of every character is a desire. They want something. They are where they are, they do what they do, because they believe that it is leading them to what they desire. They also have a se...
Generally, trios work because a trio follows an Id-Ego-Superego dynamic. Two better display it, I'll swap out characters for two famous fictional trios: Repsectively, this can be the McCoy(Bones)...
I'm not sure a fictional character needs a real house. Even if the address is specified, interior and even exterior details can be different. You might find particularly fanatic readers asking awkw...
Is the exact address really relevant for the story? Choosing a real location has several disadvantages: It could lead to harassment for whoever really lives there now or in the future It limits ...
If you want inspiration on the interior or exterior of a character's home, then there's no reason you can't use homes that are for sale for inspiration. If the problem is simply that those web page...
Many will say what you're striving to do is impossible because you won't have seen enough tricks of the trade in use, but I'll do my best to suggest a way forward that doesn't boil down to, "read N...
In all the author biographies I have read, two things seem to be constant. They are all voracious wide-ranging readers, and they all (or almost all) started writing in some form at a very early age...
A letter is from the future so we are talking about science fiction. It makes us think about science, but letter is for current time and also readers are of the current time. So whatever will happe...
Killing a minority character isn't a problem in itself. The problem is that western media (particularly film) has a long tradition of killing of minority characters and leaving white protagonists t...
One thing that I found helpful many years ago was to participate in an online feedback site like You Write On. Basically you submit chapters / short essays for feedback and also provide feedback fo...
