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I'm getting the impression that if you were to ask the narrator now, they would say that Rebecca was not, and had never been, much of a friend. If that's correct, you could try something like : ...
With "I supposed", I'm trying to convey that if you had asked the narrator, at the time the story takes place, whether Rebecca was one of his closest friends, he would have said, "I suppose....
I have no real answer, but a few questions that you can reflect upon yourself to help you deciding: If the narrators' name is irrelevant, why not giving him a standard one? Like, "John". If the n...
Two good answers already, so I'll concentrate on the word "relevant". If the narrator is relevant (someone who personally participated in the events of the story) but his name is not, there might ...
Are you working with first person narration? Is the narrator's identity important? Is he the MC, or someone on the sidelines? Does anyone ever address the narrator in dialogue in a situation where ...
One of the great misconceptions is that a story can be written in the past tense or the present tense. This is not the case. Individual sentences and sometimes phrases are written in particular ten...
I usually go with the search and replace function on Word. For most verbs you will only need to change the suffix, and then with more calm go trough the irregular verbs changing them to the new ten...
Don't Worry, and Don't Steal. If it is similar, don't worry about it. Approximately one billion articles have been written and published about the implications of various findings of Robert Muelle...
I look for resonance, with the rest of the story, and I do my best to see what the reader will expect, and deliver that. I have mentioned in other answers I am a discovery writer, but I keep my en...
You can work around the language barrier the same way we do in real life: have someone act as a translator. There are three ways of introducing such a character: Option 1: The moment the need for...
Write what people intended to say, not the sounds of the words. We don't write character accents phonetically (hopefully). We don't add every "um…" and pause that's used in normal speech. Instead ...
This all depends on the approach you want to take with your narrator. Are you taking a more second person approach with the narrator being a member of the cast (but a side member), is the narrator ...
Think Chinese. China is huge, and many languages are spoken. People from one side of the country cannot converse with people from the other. However they all read the same characters, so they all r...
One of the things you discover pretty quickly as a writer is that there are all kinds of things that we do not have words for. Worse, even if there were words of them, most people would not recogni...
Most of the time you don't want to find the one word that describes this - because if it's so hard for you to come up with this one word, chances are it's hard for your audience to understand the w...
To add to the already excellent answer, you do not need to describe body language every time, you can clearly state the subtext directly as the narrator. He leaned in and lowered his voice, all...
The classic case of this is Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which is almost entirely in the dialogue of the narrator from the frame story. "It arrested me, and he stood by civilly, holding a half-...
"Wooow!" they marvelled. To marvel is the word that comes to my mind in this case. But in general you should realize that often it's not that important to find the one word to describe some...
How many ways are there to say "Oooooooo!" Only one that I can think of. Therefore the only dialog tag you need is "said". The only reason to use a dialogue tag other than "said" is if the intonat...
I agree with @MarkBaker, that, in this case, there aren't many ways to express the line your character says. However, you could try to show something about the character that matches his/her beha...
One option you may want to keep in mind is that ooh or ooh and aah can actually be used as a verb, in place of writing out "ooooo" as dialog. Something like "Ooooo!" say said with awe can be replac...
Speaking only from my own experience, passive voice is often a last resort. I write a lot of user guide material, and my company's style guide discourages using passive phrasing, but even more stro...
Look to the Magician Archetype for Inspiration Archetypes do not become obsolete or outdated. The Magician archetype, I would think, is very close to what we might consider a modern day Scientist...
Well first I would question giving readers information that no character knows. This creates dramatic irony, and while it has its uses is very frustrating to the reader who instead of feeling like ...
You do not have to preach they are bad. They are bad because they harm others in some way. If you wish to show reality, show that harm, whatever it may be, beginning or taking place or having alrea...
