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You either write a biography, as accurate as you can, as respectfully as you can, or you write a clearly fictional story that is as different from its inspiration as you can make it. Do not try to...
Establish their winglessness before you establish their method of gestating children. You're absolutely right that this is an easier task when you have a character who is from the culture of the r...
We tend to assume whatever we're reading about is humanoid, unless we're told otherwise. (In fact, multiple stories exploit this trope to reveal later in the story, or in the very end, that the cha...
I don't think readers notice 3rd person view as another character observing the MC. I have read many books written in 3PL (3rd person limited; narrator only knows the thoughts and feelings of the ...
Personally I use Latex, more specifically pdflatex, which is free to download. It is text-based, learning it will probably take a week or two, but there are online examples and help through StackEx...
Legends can be told in first person. Some myths from Ancient Greece, sections of the Christian Bible, Biblical Psalms, The Story of Sinuhe (from Middle Kingdom Egypt), and many others are first pe...
Distance is an important element of the design of a story. In some cases you want the story to feel very intimate, as if the reader is right there with the protagonist, in their thoughts, in their ...
The fourth chapter is too late. You need to do this within the first 10% of the story (by page count), anything more is too late. If your MC does violent things for good reason, you need to give t...
The Word "Legend" Evokes an Expectation Putting Legend into a title is fine, but it's a promise to your audience of something a bit larger-than-life. Given a title like "The Legend of [Protagonis...
The line between something being an 'interesting/critical detail', and 'fluff/time wasting filler' is a fuzzy arbitrary decision best made on a case by case basis. As such we decide what to cut or ...
The trait that makes Dolores Umbridge, and other characters, repulsive, is sadism. Enjoying the suffering of others, enjoying causing pain - we find that unforgivable. A villain who hurts others du...
Have you ever noticed that most main characters seem to be "special" in some way? It might be destiny, super powers, a rebellious attitude, or maybe they're just unlucky and got targeted by the bad...
If you are talking about chapters which have some significant plot development but the focus of the chapter is on the characters' interaction, that's perfectly okay. However, if the the advancemen...
How did Jack Sparrow escape that island he got stranded on? "Sea turtles". He escaped somehow, and he isn't going to tell us how. In fact, not telling us adds to his mystique. And he knows it, whic...
Skipping scenes is usually quite welcome in a novel. Sometimes you don't want to see every step. But the amount of skipping you propose is pretty jarring. You will break your readers out of thei...
These are scene jumps that serve the plot It's unclear what you mean by this; you can make a scene jump without leaving obvious questions unresolved. If you never resolve them, readers are goi...
Any time you get two or more people in a group (or a family) with the same name, they are almost immediately given a nickname or some extra appellation so everyone knows who is being talked about. ...
I'm not 100% sure that your initial premise is correct. While a lay person might say 'fire magic' and 'death magic' are the meanings, this is just imprecise, not wrong. (Non-religious) Divinati...
Your book's universe is not ours. There is allowed to be a dissonance between how things work in your world, and how they work in ours. There's allowed to be different definitions to words in your ...
You're asking how a character, a creation of your imagination, can have free will. It's not easy for me to answer, because "they do". On a very fundamental level, that's what happens when I write. ...
This makes sense to me because my characters act in very similar ways. Have you ever been in a novel situation in your own life where you did something unexpected? Maybe you intervened when someo...
"Change of heart" may, or may not be real change of heart. There may be different scenarios to explain your events. Justice is above all. Your character "A" may be self-centered, but he has a str...
I am a big fan of the four-stage thought process. In my writing group, we call it the story cycle. We start with an event (an inciting incident for the current moment) Emotion (reaction) Reason...
I'd venture to guess that you are caught in the worldbuilding trap. Worldbuilding is a perfectly fine hobby. You can make up characters and people and kingdoms and creatures. You can draw maps. You...
+1 Mark Baker. In addition, you can pad a character with other characteristics. Don't make A's special ability his only reason to be in the story. Give him a personal goal he's working toward. Giv...
