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I don't know if this helps, but I think war movies do this very well. The Deer Hunter, Saving Private Ryan, some movies involving gangs, or cops on a mission. The series Vikings has elements of thi...
Shippers will always mistake close friendships as homosexual, because of all the natural chemistry that comes with written close friendships. Folks will have 'shipping goggles' on no matter what, a...
I'd suggest grouping them into manageable sizes, making some sort of joke out of it, and making mnemonics with their names. Here is a very bad example. It's only to make the point. Finding good n...
I have published several peer-reviewed scientific papers, also Master's Theses in two different disciplines and a long doctoral dissertation. Your proposed rule is not one I have ever followed, and...
In narrative fiction, dreams are best used for two things: To tell the reader something about the character's state of mind. If you have some sort of higher power in the tale, to provide communic...
My two favorite depictions of nightmares in fiction are the Nightmare Song in Iolanthe and Harry's nightmare in Sorcerer's Stone: Perhaps Harry had eaten a bit too much, because he had a very s...
Find yourself a writer's group where you critique each other's work. Or a group of friends/family will work for this. Make sure it's in person (or by video/phone conference, if you must). Now, r...
The differences between 'fairy', 'elf' 'goblin' and 'demon' are not negligible. The fact that a dictionary offers you all of them, or that all have been used in different setting in the past, does ...
Does it have to be an actual translation? Translations don't always work, as synonyms get lost in translation. As you mentioned, there is no English word that can mean "fairy", "elf" and "goblin". ...
Usually, writer's block is a result of your inner editor overpowering your inner writer. This is a very common problem that can especially affect experienced writers, critics, and others with a la...
Although I am a strong believer in the 3AS, you don't really need a 3AS in a character study, which is what you are doing: A work of fiction in which the delineation of the central character's pers...
If your character has no reason at all to go on the Plot Quest, then you're missing more than an inciting incident - you're missing a functional antagonist. The antagonist is often (not always) the...
In my personal experience, there is a night-and-day difference in a friend who sleeps around, and a friend who sleeps with your boyfriend. Since everyone is college-age they will have ingrained op...
You might find that research isn't quite so important. If you're describing a banquet, you don't need to picture how the guests chew and swallow their food. For the scene with the two guys, you c...
@MatthewDave is quite right in saying that a sophisticated person's language would be distinguished by lack of 'lower-class' colloquialisms. Add to that impeccable grammar, and a rich vocabulary. ...
You are telling that the human is attracted to the alien. Why not show instead? A picture is worth a thousand words, they say, so why not create that picture? Consider what attraction feels like -...
Many professional writers and editors report that there is about a 25% loss between the first finished (!) draft and the final draft. Depending on your approach (e.g. either outlining or pantsing)...
Plot, character, and world are all an integral part of story. You don't have a story, if you don't know who lives it and where it takes place. You may not know all the details when you first have ...
You need the broad strokes of the world filled out before you can really start to run characters through their paces. You can know what your characters are going to do long before you have a finish...
Both is the way to go Your story will be influenced by the world it plays in. For example, lets say your story starts in a desert. If magic requires eating certain plants that only grow in marshes...
When you're writing a story, you know all the clues and all the connections. Since you know them already, they might well seem obvious to you. Are they as obvious to the reader? A good way to fin...
If the majority of readers don't get it, the dots are too far apart. Writing is like humor, in this respect. If the majority of your audience doesn't laugh at your jokes, then you aren't funny. F...
The first thing to note, if you want these characters to be capable of being protagonists, is the potential for an arc. This means that the character must want to be somewhere, be it physically, em...
There are two cardinally different ways you can treat your characters in a series. In some series, the characters remain the same, facing the "challenge of the week". They do not undergo any signi...
Don't write characters, find characters. I'm a strong believer that open-ended stories should exist in open worlds. Rather than telling a unique and pivotal tale of daring-do they tell the story o...
