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Unless the protagonist is sadistic, a necromancer, or an undertaker down on his/her luck, odds are that face won't be beautiful. Depending on how long this person has been dead, and how they died,...
It's not inherently bad It is a trap where too many things as resolved through inner monologue when it might make the story more dynamic. I suffer from that big time where the character thinks and...
Most ingredients start with a number (1 cup flour), so they don't need to be capitalized, but if the ingredient starts with a letter (Salt to taste), it should be capitalized. See Virginia Tech's...
After reviewing several recipe web sites created by corporate media groups and Internet startups, it is clear that, in general, recipe ingredients are not capitalized, but a few online style guides...
This is not a bad way of handling exposition. I have seen what you describe work, and felt compelled to find it amongst the hundreds of books on my shelf. Thanks for the mindworm. I found a book t...
Different readers like different things. There are quite a few books that give worldbuilding background before chapters, in tales told over the campfire, in documents that the characters read, or e...
Maybe you can interleave your 7000 throughout the story by making it a perfectly "parallel" (separated) chain of mini-chapters which are a kind of preface for each chapter of your real timeline. A...
I would definitely write down your feelings in some document or journal. There’s no reason you would ever have to share it with them until you're ready, if ever. Writing is about expressing yoursel...
It's a tough question any way you slice it. Let me show you how I've written it all out, put it out there, and had the very people that did those things that hurt me read it without them ever under...
One thing you can do is to frame the explanation around a character in the story. For instance, there might be a meta narrative in which the story is being told by a particular character, and when ...
It depends largely on context. White girl can definitely be seen as a derogatory term, and is quite often used as such. No one, outside of bad American police drama, refers to people in conversati...
Some of the best detective mystery novels - I'm thinking especially about the noir genre - have a penultimate chapter where the detective solves the murder(s) and explains everything, and the bad g...
You can use "long nose" too for a funny one, as after the skin colour, this is the first thing than usually come to mind.
You can have her describe herself in an indirect manner, like My colleagues label me as a "caucasian" or "white"... Sometimes they use even more derogatory terms when they think I'm out of ears...
No one can really answer that. Because what works for you may not work for me, and that may or may not work for the next one in line. It's personal, and different people need to go about it accordi...
You've chosen a challenging structure. Normally, for a twist ending to land, the reader has to have been given most of the relevant information along the way -- think Sixth Sense. The only succes...
A few tricks come to mind. One that your description strongly suggests is similar to Agatha Christie's "And then there were none", which might be exactly the kind of work you are looking for. It ma...
Do you know any Japanese? Peppering your work with local language, when done well, can add character, authenticity and ambiance to a novel and you don't have to tell the reader outright that the ch...
Your title question and description seem to be asking different things. The title question is very specific, and the answer is yes, it's fine to begin a new chapter from a different POV, in a diff...
Mark Baker has a great answer if the simultaneous action and dialogue is a one-time thing, which I assume is the case here. But if a character has a persistent tic interwoven with their dialogue, ...
Like Adrian McCarthy's answer that cited Mark Baker's answer, I wholeheartedly approve of Mark Baker's answer. However, I wanted to further elaborate with an example in case you don't want just a ...
EDIT: I redid the whole answer, because I misunderstood the question. After some research, I can report that the short answer is that free indirect discourse is a subset of third-person limited. ...
Limited third-person narrative and free indirect discourse are analytical categories invented by academics to classify the techniques of writers because classification is what academics do (regardl...
Yes, there are rules for this type of thing. They come down to what your contract says. When you have a work published, you'll have a contract. Check out my response at the question mentioned abo...
Pay attention to your editor's/beta readers' reactions. Ask specifically: Were you satisfied with the story? Did it do what you think it set out to do? Were you suprised in a bad way about anyth...
