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You're in luck. People tend to believe self-consistent and emotionally satisfying stories over facts! So you have nothing to worry about. Apart from writing a good story, which of course is the har...
You are writing in English, your characters are going to speak English, but that is in fact a "translation convention", your characters "in reality" speaking German instead. Is that the issue you'r...
Go long! Write about the custom, and the reader will get it. In a recent Writing Challenge here on SE, I had a short Human and Extraterrestrial exchange: Human: Where are you from? ET: Earth...
First off, as has been pointed out in at least on other answer, romanize (or pinyinize, or hepbunize, or whatever other term you want to use) everything if the book is in English. English speaking...
Puns, by there nature, have a weird translation issue. Sometimes they just don't work because, they are play on words, but the pun doesn't work in the new language because those words don't sound ...
Well, I'd say that if the character is human, saving humanity is kind of in their best interests. It's not a motivation that's unique to him as a character, but it's certainly believable. If the v...
The page turning effect can be for the long term, but it is much more important for it to be short term. The reader should always be wondering "what happens next", and this is much of what causes ...
No You merely need to ensure the reader understands who is thinking, and that the text is thought. E.g. "Trevor stood before her, like an ebony sculpture, even more imposing than she remembered....
If you establish it as a convention in your novel, no. Being honest, while there are uses for outright stating thoughts as streams of dialogue-like prose, it's still a very telly form of expositio...
Let's look closely at Jurassic Park. The programmer (can't remember his name) was dissatisfied with what money he was getting. (In the movie, I don't believe there was an explanation, but in the ...
Oh boy, this one will have a thousand plausible answers. But I'll do my best to help as I can. There are, of course, a plethora of options, so please do not think this answer is the be-all end-all ...
There is the self-publishing route in which case you can utilize Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Another that I like, though more is required of you, is Smashwords. However, the act of sel...
A newly coined word is more likely not to be understood by your readers. Consider: your readers might not hang out in the particular circle where the word was coined and is known. In effect, such a...
There is no problem in using new (or even non-existent) words in your story. However... Writers do this all the time. It is part of the experience to develop a larger vocabulary. But when we learn...
When reading (especially when younger) it is common to come across a word you have never seen before, some of these words you'll need a dictionary for, but sometimes this isn't the case. Let me g...
I think there is one golden rule here: your coinage in the story must follow the conventions and motivations of real-world neologisms. We create new words for the following reasons: An equival...
Shakespeare, who may not have coined all the words he's credited with, but who certainly popularized a lot of neologisms, tended to recapitulate or paraphrase a possibly unfamiliar word in the same...
What I do: immediately make essential changes that affect later chapters If I just write on, I will have to revise even more, than if I go back now and rewrite the first chapters, before I conti...
Use a wiki Many people are using a wiki when they are creating their worlds, as can be seen by this answer to the question What software is available for keeping and organising notes about your wo...
Welcome to Possibility Paralysis Anonymous! My name is Henry and I suffer from having too many ideas... You are correct in identifying that this is more than a writing issue but perhaps a little ...
To put my answer into perspective, I am a new writer. I'm only 12000 words into my first novel. Let's say I am a month and a half in. I have a plot, I know where I want to go, I know where I am sta...
Yes, you should be able to 'feel' your outline. I admit I don't really outline in writing, although I do have well defined characters and a problem in my head before I begin writing, and I do feel...
No, you should not expect to feel your outline. An outline, by its nature, strips away all the particular details that create an emotional response. Our emotional responses are naturally regulated,...
There's a saying about writing fiction: You have a harder job than God. Because while coincidences and chance play a massive role in real life, in fiction, things generally need... a reason to hap...
What Chris said, but with the concomitant point that solutions must be merited. They don't have to be probable. Little in most stories is truly probable. Stories basically run on coincidences. Thei...
