Search
Pros Appeals to linguaphiles (especially if names are rich with internally-consistent historical or cultural meaning) Can add a sense of realism/immersion It is difficult to represent unfamiliar ...
Maybe the pros is that when someone wants some help, he or she will ask the one with shorter name. So it seems that the one with longer name can spare the triviality. While the cons may be that if ...
You may rely on the Monty Pythons' wisdom : "Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, Panties...I'm sorry...Schumann, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Bach. Names that will live for ever. But there is...
It depends. How much do you have to tell about the MC after he undergoes this transformation? Is this the main conflict of your story, or merely something that impedes the MC from dealing with the ...
Generally, the conflict is resolved in the third act. Acts end with (effectively for the story and characters) an irrevocable something, a decision, an act taken, words spoken, event transpiring, e...
You can watch almost any "kung fu" movie from the 1970s through 2000 and see "tao masters" waving their arms while various objects – water, swords, dinnerware, tree limbs – go flying and curving th...
The New York Times best selling author Jim Butcher has a very popular series called the Codex Alera. http://www.jim-butcher.com/books/alera That magic system is a mix of a couple of things but prim...
What are the consequences if you ignore these requests? If there are no consequences, add a filter to your email and divert them to the spam folder.
Soap Operas are like the Ouroboros, the snake that eats it's own tail and has no beginning or end. In this context, opera is a pejorative indicating too much of one thing (an opera being several ho...
Find a style guide and stick with it. Style guides are more than just comments - they cover all parts of your code from how you name your variables to how you structure your code. Good style guid...
What you write depends on your audience. API reference documentation -- the output of tool- like Doxygen -- is usually for the users of that API. Such externally-facing documentation focuses on t...
I'm in a situation similar to yours and I also want to maximize the chance of the novel being good enough right from the start. I plan to do this: Design the plot. Write a shitty first draft as ...
The first rule for writing narratives for games is always that the mechanics should inform the narrative. If you're finding that what you want to be the story isn't consistent with what you have fo...
Gameplay should come first in a video game. That does not mean that story should be just ignored. It isn't hard to be creative and give some kind of explanation. For example, just with what you gav...
This is probably a not uncommon problem for less professional publications, where editorial norms may not be as well-understood. That's not to say that ALL college publications are less profession...
I was the editor of my university paper back in the day. Chris Sunami's answer is right; university newspapers are produced by amateurs, people learning the trade (who might not even be taking jou...
We should have more details about the story you are writing, its setting and themes. But generally speaking, I think about two scenarios: 1) the character talks about things that are unusual to ...
Need implies no rational argument exists by witch you can have a short story without a definitive ending. Lady and The Tiger exists, therefor short stories do not need a definitive ending. QED Per...
You don't necessarily need to distinguish the two. If you write, for example, Dan stared out of the window of the classroom. A green park spread outside. Tulips and Hyacinths were in full bloom...
I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but I'll interpret it as distinguishing between thoughts of the first-person narrator as character when the story happened, and the thoughts of the narrator whe...
@galastel is right. You can mix it with another solution: use impersonal designation based on the facts known to the character about him/herself. The protagonist is a woman ? So, "The woman stood u...
One solution, at least at first, is to just use the pronoun: She woke up in a room she did not recognise. How had she got here? Where was she? Come to think of it, who was she? With a horrible ...
Acknowledgments that list about two or three pages of names have become an annoying fad that I would avoid. Sam Sacks argues "Against Acknowledgments" in The New Yorker, because to him they dimini...
Yes, you can, it is done often, and I see nothing wrong with them. Authors often spend years on a book, and it is normal human nature to thank the people that helped you through it. People don't h...
Torture Porn has a certain revelling tone to it, it enjoys the specifics for no other reason than, as Amadeus put it, its own sake. Instead of using torture as a device to show, say, that someone i...
