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In addition to what others have said about how to portray the villain, a good way to have a portrayal of a bad character who's a member of a particular group(veterans in this case) without implying...
You either don't emphasise on him being a veteran, or use it to your advantage to convey a story which makes the reader actually emphasise with him, such as flashbacks to the horrors of war which "...
I don't think it is universally true that foreshadowing should be close to the event. For example, Frodo's inability to cast the Ring into the Cracks of Doom is foreshadowed by his inability to cas...
"The Wheel of Time" is an excellent use of foreshadowing. Most of his foreshadowing was done in just a sentence here and a sentence there. It was a huge series and therefore had a lot of things to ...
In a tight long story, as in The Hobbit dovetailing into The Lord of the Rings, character expo occurs only as-needed. By Return of the King, every reader with normal perception is long familiar wit...
Whether or not your sequel can be read as a standalone novel, in the years that pass between the publication of one book and the next, it is quite likely that your readers would have forgotten some...
Add another dimension to the conflict so it is not a simple will he/won't he. There is something (a crutch, a flaw) he is unwilling to give up before he can move to the next stage. Committing to S...
Read Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. Not every recruit makes it through training or into the unit they wanted. The training is fun to read in itself. The training narrative serves to relate...
If you are so sure the reader is going to be sure what happens, then you need to make the journey interesting. There are plenty of stories in which everyone knows what's going to happen and enjoys ...
A character in 1348 would be speaking Middle English, not modern English at all. Middle English is so different from modern English, that it is a distinct language (source). The same, I suppose, wo...
In general teenagers tend to be (a) a little narcissistic and (b) intensely interested in their peers and what they think and feel. When you write in the first person as a teen protagonist, you ar...
One way to do this would be the way the movie "Fight Club" did it. In that movie the main character is a passive person who meets a very active person. This person convinces him to set up a fight ...
Do you mean a Jekyll/Hyde plot? Such a plot twist needs some amount of foreshadowing, so that the savvy reader might suspect, while the less savvy reader would have a moment of "Aha! now it all mak...
There are many ways to do this, and for just as many reasons why this can make perfect sense. Let's start with popular means, and look at the reasons this makes sense. Disclaimer: I don't know...
@F1Krazy does have a good answer but I'd like to add a few things. The age in U.S. is whether the accused is being tried as an Adult or as a Juvenile. The former is named and the latter is not. ...
If you want to be a writer -- that is, someone who writes for a living -- as opposed specifically to being a novelist, then the money is in business writing: technical writing, science writing, mar...
One of the best pieces of advice I've read, which I didn't believe at all when I first started writing (I think it was either Natalie Goldberg or Anne Lamott who said it, and either way every write...
I'm not a pro, but I do have a journalism degree and I've been published. I'm also older, and things I might have been precious about in the past have been beaten out of me. Read deliberately, li...
In what context? In a context of, for example, a newspaper, the quote is translated, and remains a quote. For example, today Israeli newspapers were all translating the statement of the Kensington...
The way you describe them they are not different You mention that one of the options is about building up small steps, hinting at the fact that he will unlock something. The other option is abou...
I'd introduce the build up first. The appearance of a DEM is difficult to overcome with subsequent explanations, IMO without a hint of what is happening, this taints your story, especially if the ...
In this case, think in terms of the process a draw-er would use to draw that concept. They would start with an oval, like an egg. "It was like an egg." In this case, it is longer than an actual...
For regular dialogue, you don't need italics. Quotation marks are what marks dialogue. Italics are usually reserved for non-verbal communication. That could be the voice in your character's head a...
The thing with an imaginary object is this: people aren't going to see the exact same thing as you see in your mind, no matter how many words you pour on it. Each reader is going to imagine what yo...
The most powerful magnifier of emotion is anticipation. Dread multiplies horror. All horror films play on this basic emotional truth. If you want to produce the most profound emotional impact on th...
