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To create a plot, you have to ask three questions of your protagonist: What does the protagonist want? What is stopping the person from getting it? What will the person to do achieve his/her goal...
A book proposal and a query letter are two distinct kinds of submissions. You write a query letter when you have finished writing your book and query whether the publisher is interested in it. Yo...
Query letters and book proposals are two related, but distinctly different tools for selling your book. A query letter is a brief "hooky" one-page document that is often sent as a "cold-call," mea...
Showing personality instead of saying personality can be great when done well. I agree with Cloudchaser's answer of getting another opinion. I'd also recommend going back through and reading it yo...
You are not foreshadowing correctly; they cannot be unrelated to the story currently happening. For example, you can foreshadow the more experienced Bill getting killed before the novice Charlie w...
Direct speech is in quotation marks, non-verbal communication, such as telepathy, is in italics, and thoughts are not marked up. Hello John. John turned around, looking for who had spoken in ...
Of course not. Who suggested that you might? To be a writer you need, basically, first imagination and then talent. All other things being equal - which almost never happens - anyone with the sam...
All aspects of translation, including the treatment of proper or made-up names, are the decision of the translator.[1] Firstly, as you correctly stated, the author cannot be expected to know the t...
If I understand correctly, the comments are in the original text. That's what the translator's note says: the interlinear comments (IC) and marginal comments (MC) in the original text If some...
This is a question about dialogue and effective dialogue, can and should do more than just feature a conversation between two people (or the self - inner dialogue). It should add depth and personal...
Stealing is bad. Quite aside from it being illegal, what satisfaction would you draw from presenting someone else's work? It's not yours, the praise it gets is not to you. Being inspired by anothe...
Well, first of all, Picasso never said it. Please see, for example, this investigation which could find no evidence to suggest Picasso ever said this. In fact, the earliest quote that could be foun...
You sound like a perfect candidate for studying Joseph Campbell and The Hero with a Thousand Faces (AKA the Monomyth). It is not so much that people steal or blatantly copy as it is writers draw up...
If you want to say something to the reader, just say it. You are writing a novel, not a movie. You are narrating the whole thing and everything in it is said by you to the reader. In LOTR, Tolkie...
You can tell the reader directly and that is how it is commonly done. The world wasn't as bad as Jamie thought, but he didn't know it at the time. That's why you call it an "omniscient narra...
You can't judge a period character based on modern values. In a setting (real or imaginary) when slaves are owned, and society does not challenge it, it would be anachronistic for your character to...
To me the answer depends on why was slavery not abolished? If slavery remains in practice because enlightenment failed in America and economic and racist interests won, then (from the perspective ...
Under what circumstances is this kind of alternate history desirable, or at least acceptable? I think in large part this depends on how well known the true history is. In this case, I think yo...
Alternate History is a real (and popular) genre. Alternate History fiction asks "what if something different happened" and then extrapolates how the world would be different. Generally, the 'this'...
It is good that you have identified a problem that seems to permeate your writing. If I understand the feedback you are getting correctly, the problem is that your beta readers simply don't care f...
I do not, to my knowledge ever. I am not a lawyer but I believe copyright applies: If the sentence or fragment you want to use is original (meaning it cannot be found in multiple sources or from a ...
I've had a similar problem and here's an orthogonal answer to what you probably expect ... : "I don't know what your main character wants." ^^ Has anyone said this to you? ^^ Some thoughts that ...
articy:draft from Nevigo The software is specifically designed for writing in a software development environment. It has things like asset management so that you can manage all your characters wit...
A free open-source tool for telling non-linear / interactive storylines is Twine Another non-free alternative to articy:draft is Chat Mapper From the forum posts and reviews I read, most that t...
In Short: Your character should be villainous because they have the qualities of a villain, not because the group they are from gives them villainous qualities. I think your real question is "how ...
