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The Song-Writer's Rhyming Dictionary, by Sammy Cahn Out of print, worth looking for. The introduction alone, an essay by the author about the process of lyric writing, is worth the purchase price....
This is definitely a high wire act. I had to do it for one scene a novel where I had two lovers who were both misunderstanding the other's motives and actions. The only way to make full sense of wh...
Who is the narrator? Was he a street thug? If he was, then it wouldn't make much sense to have him narrating using the Queen's English. The narrator should talk in their voice, not yours. Don't di...
We use Madcap Flare for our documentation, and the project is checked into git. (In case this matters, this is a locally-hosted git server, not GitHub.) The project uses a .gitignore file to aver...
I don't understand the example emboldened below. Can't you add just a superscript number in the text, then in the footnotes cite that "minor case"? Unquestionably one superscript cannot "detract fr...
We use Madcap Flare for our documentation, and it has an annoying property: if you happen to have the shift key down when you type a space, it inserts a non-breaking space ( ). Our docume...
The Hugo awards are prominent fan awards in the SF&F genre. In 2021, I noticed that all of the finalists in the Novella category are from a single publisher, Tor.com. Novellas have, I underst...
I am thinking of starting a blog and wondering how I should approach it. Is it better to have a niche blog or is general/miscellaneous content fine?
If you have a point that you do want to convey, this is certainly a legitimate practice. You shouldn't make artificial points just to have them, however. It is important to ensure that your point...
Rather than focusing on a single point as if you are writing an essay, you may want to focus on an ethos you want to create. View your story as world-building (this is something you will find Or...
In the sense you mean, it probably stands for general fiction, i.e. not romances, science-fiction, or mysteries. (Fiction that is "literary".) There's a lot of genre fiction that has excellent char...
To me, LitFic is fiction that is not a "page turner" (i.e. a story with only very direct surface themes, that gets you to the next page via suspense, but doesn't make you think about anything outsi...
I think the wikipedia definition gets quite close to the essence. Additionally, you might think about the type of fiction meant to have an aesthetic value/quality, that is what literary fiction hop...
Here's the money quote from a good article on the subject: In broad terms, literary fiction focuses more on style, psychological depth, and character and tends to be multilayered stories which ...
In addition to +1ing a couple other answers, I'd add: It seems to me that the breakdown of fiction into genres (including "literary") is an imperfect system that mostly serves commercial needs. So...
A really useful website you might want to look at is https://web.archive.org/web/20100306171618/http://www.essortment.com/all/synopsiswriteb_rqmx.htm Sorry i can't really summarise :P
Most important part is, reducing the story to the core plot. Some say you should only need three pages to summarize your story, some say one page should be enough. But if you can reduce its core to...
I have encountered numbers of excellent fanfics out there which could stand out on their own, and be excellent works by themselves if the author just didn't constrain himself into the pre-created w...
Over on the Judaism site, I summarized a narrative text in a block quotation. Because the narrative is well-known, I expected many people to skip the block quotation; therefore, I did not want it t...
You almost have to assign your book a genre in order to describe it to an agent or publisher; the publisher will likely make the final determination of what genre they assign internally, and this c...
Inspired by a news post about ohlife I set up a small script that sends me an e-mail message each day asking me about my day. I just reply to that message with my daily journal if I have something ...
quoting wikipedia: Genre ... "kind" or "sort", from Latin: genus (stem gener-), Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature, as well as various other forms of art o...
Using dialect or slang can work very well, but it usually doesn't. (Mark Twain is the only example I can think of where it was done well.) Slang is another matter, with some of the same pitfalls. H...
I don't know if Fanfic is a crutch or useful practice, but it is fun. For me, writing fanfic is one of the ways I enjoy a book. So I'd do it whether it's useful or not. That said, can writing fanf...
Agreed that it all depends on who the narrator's supposed to be, and, frankly, what tone you're trying to bring across to the reader. Two of my favorite opening paragraphs of all time: When a...
