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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...
It's certainly possible, but it's not always easy to do in a way that doesn't feel forced. If you look at it from the perspective that "evil" is more of an attitude than a specific act you can show...
It seems to me you need to answer some more basic questions first. What do you want to write about? Why do you want to write about it? Who is your audience, and why will they read your book? The ...
To the person experiencing anger, it won't appear irrational. To them, there's a very good reason why they're angry, why they're infuriated. What you need is to show the reason. Now, the reason mi...
Like @celtschk says in a comment, traditional encyclopedias like Britannica have professional editors. It is their task to decide what gets an entry and what doesn't. This is different from Wikipe...
That struck me as wrong; because since the character is experiencing it, for them the walls don't seem to be moving, they are moving. No, the word "seemed" is appropriate, if the character kno...
The thing is the two say very different things, this one: I stumbled to the ground and hit my head. I got back up. The walls and floors seemed to be moving makes it clear that for the POV cha...
