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In terms of building a character, what should guide you is what the story requires. If you need a mad scientist to make Frankenstein's monster, but the person you meet is nice and well-spoken, do y...
Of course, since spells and potions don't exist in this world, all we have are sources from people who believed they existed. For spells, you could check out the Malleus Maleficarum. It's a medie...
As others have mentioned, writing a prologue from a different POV than the rest of the story is common enough. The part I'm not sure about is writing the prologue in first person, while the rest of...
As other answers have stated a different POV for prologues is quite a common technique, particularly in SF and Fantasy (George R.R. Martin, Robert Jordan, David Eddings and Brandon Sanderson have a...
Dig until you discover what fundamental "truth" the bigot rejects. That will usually be the opposite of some fundamental "truth" you fully accept. Accept that people are rational. Reason proceeds ...
Audiences always confuse the author with the narrator, and your chosen format makes this particularly difficult. Slam poetry is typically confessional in nature, which means that your audience is ...
This website shows the rubric used to grade SAT tests. It does not discuss contractions anywhere. So I believe that as long as you use a style that fits the criteria described by the rubric, whethe...
Sir Terry Pratchett had several characters who, like Jack Sparrow, were used sparingly in the stories of others, but had a strong presence both in terms of their impact on the story, and in terms o...
The nicest way I've ever seen of pointing out hand gestures and body language in a narrative without disrupting it was to not specify what the hand gestures/body language are/is but simply to note ...
There´s a few tropes to do this. Read the works of notorious nazi Joseph Goebels to learn more (seriously). My personal favorite is the Ralph Kane aproach: a secondary character that had the same p...
Leave the readers imagining the future. For me, at least, a satisfying ending, besides the things you have mentioned, leaves me imagining the future, for the MC(s), and/or for the world they live...
One way to do it is to write a novel that doesn't have the big bad as a crutch, or the sole instigator of conflict. Perhaps the consequences of the big bad's actions, like a long-standing distrust ...
How do you escalate a story's plot after killing the Big Bad? A Series? It sounds like you plot a series. For those, from the beginning your intent should be to defeat a new villain in each s...
The Big Bad, by definition, is the primary antagonist of a story built around the defeat of a primary antagonist. If defeating the Big Bad isn't the end of the story, then either that person wasn'...
There are many ways you can go with a series after the Big Bad is defeated. Was that in fact the Big Bad? Or were they in fact a servant of an Even Bigger Bad? Perhaps they were, in some way, a v...
Using words wrongly or awkwardly sounds much worse than having a restricted vocabulary. Therefore, your best bet is to stick to words you know well and are comfortable with. If that includes a wi...
It is not uncommon for fictional works to start with quotes from real or fictional personages. Dune, in particular, makes heavy use of this tool, starting every chapter with excerpts from fictional...
Thinking deeper, speaking in terms of the "trouble" as you said, that/this might be the realm of serious psychological/mental health applications of your question logic. What Discovery Channel's Ma...
It depends a lot what you are trying to achieve. Some things are very specific and you are going to need very specific research to convey them properly. Take drugs for example, different drugs ha...
It alarms me that you've written a novel and then opened a new document to start again. The best advice I can offer is to leave your novel for a month - don't even think about it. If you're itchi...
A good trick that I use is to write the events on index cards. Just a quick summary of the things that happen. Then you can visually arrange them in an order that suits. I used to stick a post-it o...
It sounds as though this is your first novel. Congratulations! You have accomplished something very few people ever do. To answer your question, consider these points. What is the arc of your st...
Perhaps your MC is really a secondary character. I was writing a novel and had it all planned out, then met the real MC on page 180 (long hand manuscript on legal) and rewrote the book with a diffe...
That's absolutely fine. As other answers have said the concept of a fairly generic plot where the sub-stories are the real meat is very old indeed and can work very well. Especially with the rise...
Fiction is never "realistic". Frodo doesn't go to the toilet even once during the months he's on the road. He must have had massive constipation at Mount Doom. The purpose of fiction is to entert...
