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In a written medium, your readers can only identify your characters by what you give them. We cannot "see" your characters. So, if at any point in the story there's a John, and then again there's a...
Personally, I don't think there IS an internal monologue; irrational anger is all feeling and emotion, perhaps single words, and I would describe those, not try to transcribe those thoughts. The di...
Closest I can think of, though perhaps a little archaic: "Harumph, you're quick on the uptake I take it." But, like DPT, I would be more inclined to keep it out of dialogue tags.
The chances of getting a three volume set of 400,000 word novels by an unknown writer accepted for publication are as near to zero as makes no difference. Such a project would be extremely expensiv...
Bathos is not the mere fact of a serious moment being followed by a light one. It is an intrusion of a cheap vulgar laugh into a dramatic scene. It undermines the seriousness of the stakes, the dra...
Subversion is not just a way to introduce literary variety. It is actually subversive. It overturns the established order. So you have to ask yourself, why does the established order exist, and wha...
I think they have to more than balance the scales, in the reader's eyes. Anytime a soldier kills an enemy combatant, she may be depriving a parent of their child, a child of their father, a wife o...
The abstract is a short description of the paper as a whole: e.g. with one or two sentences each: The specific area of interest your problem lies in The specific problem in that area your paper w...
You can most certainly write a nonfiction of 80 words, but, as Galastel says, it won't be an essay. An essay is an argument. It martials evidence in support of a point of contention. You can't do t...
I think it is pretty easy, even as a true story. Pick your story, and try Intro, Complication, Try, Resolution. One or two sentences each. Here are two 80 word solutions. When I was ten, my all...
The easiest way to do this is have a character use it, and another character (like yourself, not knowing the word at that age) ask what it means, or look it up, or otherwise figure out what it mean...
This reminds me of Life of Pi. The protagonist is a young man from India named Piscine (French for "swimming pool". I forget why he's called this, but I'm sure he does explain it). As a kid, he wa...
What makes it good is a good use of sensory information that the reader can recognize, "a warm blanket on a cold night" is talking about a particular sensory feeling we can relate to. It has to b...
I would not call it a redemption arc, I could see this as simple revenge for somebody taking some piece of property he was enjoying. In a redemption, the character realizes they have been wrong an...
If you are a bestselling novelist, you can pitch an outline. Otherwise, you have to have a finished manuscript. Nonfiction is different. You pitch a book proposal, which usually includes sample ch...
As Mark says, not without a track record of one bestseller after another. But if you got that, you should be pretty rich, so why bother? Rowling and Stephen King probably don't worry about stuff li...
Case 1: The opening of the wallet is irrelevant to the story You have already established that the woman has a small wallet from where she pulls out small coins. You can skip all subsequent restat...
I disagree, they are better if they are not exclamatory. It is like saying "Spare me." in response to an unfunny joke. An exclamation point changes the meaning, it is intended to be bored cynicism...
Maybe enclose the words in some other punctuation? Brackets: "Wow! You [finally listened to] my stinking advice!" Curly Brackets: "Wow! You {finally listened to} my stinking advice!" G...
Placing foreign languages phrases in italics is a well established convention that extends outside the bounds of fiction. It is always vastly preferable to stick with established conventions since ...
Adding a couple of points to @Mark Baker's answer (please read that one first). It is fine if the secondary characters exist solely for the purpose of supporting the main character, but don't let ...
As the other answers have pointed out the key to not breaking immersion is to have the actions be in character and consistent with previously established traits the character has. You can have a ch...
That is what secondary characters are for. If you conceive of a story as the arc of a principal character, then every event and every secondary character exists to define that arc, to push the char...
You may be interpreting McKee too narrowly. "Design in time," for instance, does not have to imply a strict sequence. But I would suggest that you look at the word "plot" in much the same way as ...
A story is characters facing a serious problem they must struggle to solve. That is my own definition, though it is simple enough others may have come to the same conclusion. The "plot" flows from...
