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Thrawn was this (minus the physical fighting abilities) in Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire Star Wars trilogy. His gimmick was he could read species' and individuals' intentions and thought patter...
Dry is not a precise or technical term in writing. It is more of an I-don't-know-what-it-is-but-I-know-I-don't-like-it term. There are a lot of those in writing because in the end it is the total e...
Two thoughts. Literature is not about the character's emotions. It is about the reader's emotions. In real life, every single TV cop and mystery series detective would be invalided out with PTSD ...
I doubt it is specific to romance. It seems to be everywhere. I keep finding books that have no reason to be in first person (and in some cases every reason not to be) which are in first person non...
Stealing is bad. Quite aside from it being illegal, what satisfaction would you draw from presenting someone else's work? It's not yours, the praise it gets is not to you. Being inspired by anothe...
I face the problem myself when I dabble in future SciFi stories and settings, I like to use a "Famous 3" where the third one is an oddball that is either comically modern compared to what we see Or...
1) You had to have some plot (or situation) to begin the book. Although that obviously underwent revisions; you now have a beginning, and an end. Of the first character(s) introduced, how do they ...
You can't. You have a cast of characters that will work for your story. Now you see that those characters are not as diverse as today's media makes you feel is necessary. So you want to change som...
For those of you who are unfamiliar with TV Tropes lingo, a Complete Monster is the worst kind of villain imaginable: one that is evil to the core and has little to no redeeming traits whatsoever. ...
I am not a proficient story writer but I try to pay attention to the story line more than anything else when I absorb art. I will work with your latest edit: An example would be that the main c...
I would say it's to keep the reader guessing where you are taking them. Writing well gramatically with rich vocabulary, is the art of the execution only. Complex fictional characters and story-line...
The alternative is to stop listening to people who say silly things like that. There is, unfortunately, a sub-culture of writers who obsess over the minutia of prose without having any actually s...
Building a car is a repeatable process. It happens on an assembly line and each step is the same. There are some small, intentional variations in the process to accommodate customization like pai...
Actually, every fiction book is the same. Check out "The Hero with a Thousand Faces"- it explains the base concept behind any story. The details is all that differ. And it's not only about books. ...
Here's a question you must answer to yourself: what is writing to you? Is it a hobby, a pastime, something you enjoy but do not take too seriously? Do you aspire to achieve anything in this field (...
I think transitioning to screenwriting is quite difficult, and it is considerably MORE difficult to break into than novel writing. The competition is greater, the "need to be an insider" angle is v...
At the heart of every story there is a moral choice -- a choice about values. The hero will be brought by some means to a point where they must choose between two things that they love. They may ch...
Reading books of Dan Brown and that sort (pardon my inability to produce any other relevant examples off the top of my head) gives off the impression to budding writers that novels need to have a m...
From OP in comments: I turn 19 in a month. I've been writing fiction since I was about 8 or 9. I love it. I'm not in it for the money, I just want people to read my stories. I wouldn't care if ...
You are providing too much detail, and it is confusing, and therefore boring the reader. What you need to do is write the take-away consequences of these exchanges, forget the verbatim of what eith...
Hang a lantern on it. If possible, I would revise your story to make the MC's transformation secret but brief, in fact you can take a chapter where the rest of the group is trying to find the MC, ...
I'm planning on shooting a documentary on a potentially important shift in a friend's life. In an attempt to educate myself a little bit before shooting the events, I'm reading about the classic st...
You are telling that the human is attracted to the alien. Why not show instead? A picture is worth a thousand words, they say, so why not create that picture? Consider what attraction feels like -...
Audiences always confuse the author with the narrator, and your chosen format makes this particularly difficult. Slam poetry is typically confessional in nature, which means that your audience is ...
Sir Terry Pratchett had several characters who, like Jack Sparrow, were used sparingly in the stories of others, but had a strong presence both in terms of their impact on the story, and in terms o...
