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Yes, we are all murderers at heart. We are all killers at heart, for food. Some evolutionary scientists believe we would not have evolved brains without eating meat on a regular basis; regardless...
People Change One thing to remember is that celebrities (and all of us for that matter) change and age with time. So what a celebrity looks like "today" may not be what she looks "now". She wa...
I think this is a "you can if you can" answer. If you have 500, put a billboard on your site that says "Looking for writers, editors, research, moderation. We want to crowd-source this site!...
TL;DR Short pages are better. The Ideal Structure I would recommend the following: Each page should have a single, clearly defined purpose Each pages should have a clearly defined audience Pag...
This rule is because it is easier to impose simple rules than to inculcate good taste. In real life, try to develop good taste by reading excellent examples with attention. In class, do what you ar...
While I do see avoiding contractions completely as fairly arbitrary for expository writing in a History class, in a composition or creative writing class, there is a case to be made for seemingly a...
I think you have to look at DXM this way: the resolution of the hero's arc has to be merited. The hero can merit their solution by achieving it by their own actions. But they can also merit it by d...
It's a simplistic answer, I know, but the qualification both Orwell and Wodehouse shared was that they were excellent writers. There's a tendency to think of qualifications as pieces of paper issu...
Some Japanese manga have lots of hardship, and most get you hooked right from the start or the first few chapters. In shoujo in particular, the heroine or female main character tends to have it di...
I don't know much about writing, but studying maths maybe I can give you some ideas anyway. First: Just because someone likes science doesn't mean they just walk through it and understand everythin...
You don't find them. They are hiding from people like you. And from people like me. You might as well announce that you have decided you want to play professional baseball and want to get the names...
No, your character does not have to succeed. Along the same lines as Mark's answer, in which competence and proactivity are concerned, you can also add to your mix the idea of sympathy. Each of t...
I wrote a whole book on this subject. It is called Every Page is Page One: Topic Based Writing for Technical Communication and the Web. In it I look at the research on how people use technical info...
The first thing your question brings to mind is Stan Lee saying he wrote Spider-Man to be the first superhero “who’d lose out as often as he’d win—in fact, more often.” So the story structure of h...
It really doesn't matter IMO. It depends on how you feel with your story. It sounds to me like you have it planned well. Do you know what it will be called?
It depends on your character arcs Switching POVs to a secondary character is actually incredibly common in romance series. Each book completes the romantic arc of a single couple, and then the se...
"The purpose of the book is to convince..." That is likely the source of your problem right there. If a book is didactic or polemical in nature, it is generally only of interest to those who suppor...
Character traits should be seen. Absolutely. Being told that someone is smart isn't enough - he has to use his brains. However, can you sometimes tell rather than show traits? Let me show you some ...
Add setting, emotions, hesitations, frustrations, and interruptions and questions. To me (and IMO) a wall of dialogue is typically an under-imagined scene, and it needs to be longer. What is your...
Start by writing about a character into whom you have the most insight, about whom you have the most to say. Art is about vision. It is about seeing what others do not see and transforming it into ...
I suggest you start with an Innocent (or an Outsider) — a Cabbagehead kind of character, someone who doesn't know anything about your world so the world has to be explained to and/or experienced by...
If you do go to a college, make sure it is one with a great writing program. There's nothing worse than being shackled to debt with a piece of paper that says, "sorry for your trouble, but I'm not ...
Depending on your setting, it might make sense for your character to be racist, it might even make more sense for them to be racist than not to be. For example, in medieval Europe, if someone wasn'...
You want a character to be engaging, not necessarily likable. Breaking Bad doesn't have a likable or even sympathetic protagonist; it has a competent one and an engaging mystery. An unlikable chara...
I want to share an example of how this was done wrong. Let us turn to the great bastion of bad writing - 2000s computer games. Enter MechWarrior 4. You play as Ian Dressari, rebel leader. You are...
