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Sounds like you want to write a philosophical novel. Two examples that I can think of are Walker Percey's Lost in the Cosmos and Robert Persig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Both of t...
You tell it. Show vs tell has become a monster that is twisting fiction out of any recognizable shape. While it is often good advice for particular passages, telling is a fundamental part of the no...
I recently read a novel with a section that went something like this: "I have often wished that I had born into a different family; that I had never studied art at college; that my voice weren't so...
I was looking for some writers who are famous for their rich in metaphors, poetic style (to study and learn from them). Surprisingly, Google had failed me, locating only one page with a relevant qu...
Okay, so every 5 minutes I see a question uploaded to this site about writing software. What is writing software? Why don't you just plan on paper? I find it much easier to write out all of my mudd...
There are those that claim that bestsellers cannot be made. They advise you to write the story that feels most relevant to yourself, because otherwise your writing will feel void and empty. Then t...
I prefer to think of an either "almighty character" or a kind of Carnival Barker when writing in the Third Person...he can do anything he wants...and indeed he should passing through time and space...
I began work A Long Time Ago(tm) on this particular book and only took it up again about eighteen months ago. Back in 2007, I checked around but didn't see anybody of note with the name of my prota...
Once you get past the ra ra enthusiasm of the forums, you need genuine criticism, both of your own work and of literature and the writing process in general. That is hard to find online, in part be...
Not necessarily, no. In fact, probably not. NaNoWriMo puts an emphasis on words, and on getting words down on paper. But words are merely a vehicle. What we call "writing" is actually about storyte...
If you have so many pauses that you feel the need to vary how you describe them, chances are that the reason it feels repetitive is that you are reaching for the same device too many times, not tha...
"Show don't tell," as a three-word directive, is pithy and simplistic. But it's used because it's one of the fundamentals of writing well, and one of the things new writers understand least. As La...
I think an author's personal stance can absolutely be a deal-breaker. I won't buy or read anything more from Orson Scott Card now that I know about his raging homophobia. It would be an endorsement...
It is well known that the postmodern novels often use citations and references to other cultural objects, first of all to the other novels. Sometimes it is necessary to read several of them in orde...
There is no postmodern canon that you have to work through to be able to participate in postmodern intellectual and artistic discourse. If you want to create postmodern art (which is always at the ...
This is merely my opinion as a YA(28) but I feel that you shouldn't have to worry about hiding who you are. 90% of the time I never even looked at the author's name of a book when picking one out ...
Almost anything will scare off some readers in some contexts. That does not make them wrong things. It just makes the things that appeal to one person more than another. No work of art or communica...
The character I describe is in fact reflective of somebody I know in real life--a kind of nihilist who finds all pursuits and goals "hollow and ridiculous", as the person says. This inevitably impl...
What you describe is a person who denies the value of anything, and yet creates things. This is a contradiction. If nothing has value or meaning, there is no point in creating anything, and, for th...
I'm just an amateur writer. One thing that's strange to me is that there seem to be "rules" about writing. The story should consist of five parts, etc. To my untrained writing brain this seems t...
Fantasy literature is full of examples of characters passing between real and imaginary worlds. It is one of the core theme of fantasy literature. Indeed, the roots of fantasy literature are all in...
This is generally inadvisable (which is not to say that it is not done sometimes). The reason it is inadvisable is that every artform has its palette, its set of devices and conventions by which it...
They generally announce to the reader the beginning of a new story arc. I think that's about all there is to it. The format of a sequence of short story arcs that combine more or less loosely to fo...
People clearly differ in the amount and type of planning they do. But I think it is important to bear in mind that in the end a novel is an expression of a vision. Its function is to create a vivid...
It's also similar to Harry Potter and Divergent. Just as there was a rash of vampire/paranormal YA fiction after Twilight, there's currently a run on quasi-facist highly and arbitrarily segregated ...
