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I can see several differently flavoured options. The Entity is worshipped as a God, or similar. You do not risk your God's existence for your own goals. You give up your life for your God. This i...
Do not post online as you write it; even most professional writers do not like their first drafts, and IMO a beginner should never like their first draft, so you are just inviting criticism of some...
A very generic guideline that is often used is to have three arguments/aspects/... This is often structured in the form of a Five-Paragraph-Essay where you have one paragraph that you use to introd...
I think the term you're looking for is NARRATIVE VOICE, sometimes called Narrative POV but that oversimplifies it. The narrative voice sets the tone and pace for the story, but also signals how we...
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 ...
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,...
I am working on a technical book teaching users how to analyse data using geographic information systems. I would like to use data from an open source data portal such as open source fire departmen...
Men and women often take a different approach to solving problems. What I'm guessing is that you've got a great opportunity to show how the 14th century man has expectations of him which he may no...
Things are not as they seem. Time and again. What you present to the MC is not what it seems to be. It requires your imagination to figure why it isn't. You can conceive of a problem: Then try to ...
Suppose you are part of a development team working on a fighting game, and you're given the role of creating about 30 or 40 unique characters from many different backgrounds from the ground up. It'...
Logistics and Blocking What you are describing is logistics and blocking: Colonel Mustard is in the Observatory with the Revolver. Adding the who-where-when details to a scene is no differe...
I think it depends on the character of your high born individual and the lower born (though not necessarily common) friend. If the higher ranking character is so used to hearing his title - essen...
Similar questions have been asked in the past, for example How do I make an ESL character sound realistic? and How to write dialogue for someone who is intelligent but barely speaks the language? Y...
Two blank lines - be consistent! You asked the same question on some other, more specialised, sites, so I am looking through them and some others to consolidate the knowledge here for future reade...
I had a similar issue in a story of mine; a letter is the catalyst for the action that is basically the whole story. The way I approach this (and many other writing problems) is to remember the pe...
As a teacher, I never look at the examples given as 'correct answers' when we're talking about personal writing topics. Let me elaborate with two examples: a) Write an essay about Romeo and Julie...
Can it be effective instead to move the Inciting incident to the very beginning? No. Obviously that is my opinion, and you may find some decent writing that has done that; good writers have b...
This sounds a little like, how do I subvert or avoid some common fantasy tropes? (This question, I asked, deals with subverting a trope). The reason I do not think this is a duplicate question is ...
I wouldn't recommend this. Anything that appears in quotation marks is meant to be taken literally. When I first read your example, my first thought was that Celine was talking - and actually sayi...
When reading answers to questions like this we should always keep in mind an annoying truth about writing: What works for one will not work for all. Even what works for many will still not work for...
Another answer (in addition to my old answer): One approach is that your agent/publisher is going to want to know what other book yours is like, specifically "This book will appeal to readers of Th...
The most obvious approach, depending one where the help is to be displayed, is to use italics for optional items. That is a well established convention in command-line documentation. ARRAY[data-typ...
David Weber's The War God's Own has some lengthy travel scenes in it which he does quite well. I suspect this as an older book predates his Heinlenesque tendency to include huge info-dumps. You can...
I tend to write outlines using emacs and org-mode, because I do technical research that involves a lot of programming, and as a result, I live in emacs. Aquamacs is an emacs port for OS X that's fr...
Is it worth it for writers to give away free short stories (or entire novels)? I've heard people say that having freebies on your site can boost sales of your books. I'm not talking about giving aw...
