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I wouldn't do it, speaking from experience. I paid for an edit long ago, on my first completed novel, and my editor did not do anything I couldn't have done with spellcheck and Grammarly (both free...
Every propositional document (that is, one that is not telling a story) consists of three parts: the conclusion, the argument, and the evidence. The native or intuitive way that most people write s...
First, I am not a business lawyer, or tax attorney. The following are my understandings from being in business, do not rely on this as legal advice, and you should consult with a business lawyer or...
Characters seem natural when they pursue their goals in a way that is consistent with their values. (Their actual values, not necessarily the values they give lip service to for the sake of social ...
Your goal here is to engage your intuition in ways that will help you assess your own, written work. (Everything in this answer applies to your dialogue, but also to all your writing in general). ...
Sometimes you don't. You can (and should) read it out loud to yourself. But there really isn't a substitute for having other people listen to it. In my critique group, we read a portion of our p...
I don't think the "unauthenticated" part is necessary, but a legend is a story told about somebody else, a traditional story, and it can't be a "tradition" if it is being told for the first time by...
I think the problem here (and the reason the OP feels it "tastes artificial") is too much coincidence: First, we have deer in the forest, but for some unexplained reason the dragon cannot find a ...
Panics have deep roots. They don't come out of the blue. They arise out of our need to make sense of our lives, to find patterns in randomness. Pattern finding is how our brains work, and it serves...
@Amadeus mentions constraints. Constraints are like the walls of a house - they are limits, but also supports of the structure. The constraints define the shape of the story you tell. If change is...
No character is irredeemable. If professional wrestling teaches us nothing else it teaches us that any character can make a face turn just as any character can make a heel turn. But authors don't...
What he means is avoid lengthy preamble and explanation for a story setup, but really it is hard to understand "start as close to the end as possible" without understanding story structure in gener...
I don't think it is too much. Many characters have "double lies", and in a way one can block the other. You say the deep lie won't make your MC fail in action, but that isn't true: You say the MC c...
First, real publishers don't advertise. It is really as simple as that. No legitimate publisher advertises for submissions because any real publisher is bombarded with manuscripts on a constant bas...
When I don't know how to do something, I look for examples of how somebody else did it. Here's an example from Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series. The main character, a wizard, had a kinetic shield...
Exact mechanics are less important than control No matter how the exact transformation works the key thing that matters is how it is controlled. A scientific device, a superpower, and a magic wand...
There is a scene in Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver which, I believe, holds the answer to your question: I didn't mean to say no to him that day. I had never said no to him before, because I knew...
007 doesn't come off as a psychopath, but is singularly unafraid of death. In one movie he dives off a cliff, without a parachute, to intercept and land on the wings of a private plane. He's always...
The challenge of the day is to rename your magical process as 'memory erasing' and the person affected as 'memory cleansed' or 'memoryless' (or variations thereof). No more worries about amnesia, e...
I think people would not give much thought to it, particularly if no other characters gave much thought to it. On the other hand, if other characters are upset about this cross-species "mixed marr...
You seem to suggest that a paragraph that has no other function whatsoever within the narrative, beyond providing an evocative pause, is somehow special, or maybe even "pure". Of course, such a pa...
Sigh. Must agree with Galastel, again! You need tension, just a different kind of tension, or conflict. Even friendly disagreement, filled with laughter, represents tension. The laughter (or mourn...
I thought both The Bourne Identity and the beginning of the TV Series Blindspot did a decent job with amnesiac MCs. In both cases, the MC was obviously worried about their lack of memory, but also...
Be free, and truthful If there is a truth, speak the truth. If you as an author decide what the truth is in your fictional world, then, again, speak it. You should only be worried about a lie: if ...
If you want to self-publish, then probably you do need a site. If you intend to find an agent that finds you a publisher, then probably not. If anything, you can rely on your publisher to handle a...
