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Make Beowulf more complex, which was your goal anyway. Consider Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon) on NCIS. The ultimate cop: But he isn't. When his wife and child were murdered by a drug dealer, and the ...
You are mistaken in your basic assumption regarding what gives characters depth. If heroic Beowulf is in your story secretly a bad guy, that in and of itself doesn't make him three-dimensional. Tha...
I used cleaned up speech; but I only use words I have actually heard people use in casual speech (or at least feel like I have heard used). I think the trick is to stick with things real people sa...
Being upfront is about telling the truth, and unwilling to tell a white lie to preserve somebody's feelings. Being a jerk is about being selfish and uncaring. They don't give a shit about anybody...
You still want your dialogue to be real speech. It's just cleaned up speech. If you have a critique group, read the scene out loud to them. Ditto if you have people willing to read drafts. Yo...
Heroes Have Consequences. Heroes cause major changes, and every major change is likely to be negative for somebody, and often that person is an innocent. No matter what the setting, defeating evil...
I think the weirdness you're encountering is that you're using technical speak to convey something to the user who doesn't need to know that. To you this is a tab. While many (most?) people who u...
@MatthewDave suggests asking yourself what your story is about. I would go farther: ask yourself what is the meaning of your story, what it is you're trying to say. If you're saying nothing at all...
+1 Galastel; I would say one way to approach an answer to her question, "What is the meaning of your story", is to ask yourself What do my characters learn? Deep stories, at least by my definition...
You write. If what comes under your fingers is not great, if you're not satisfied, you rewrite. It's easier to find what needs to be improved once you have something, than finding the perfect scene...
The thing that is often unnatural about giving exposition in dialogue is that both people having the dialogue should already be aware of what is being said. To solve that problem, you can either in...
+1 DPT, yes your characters should be interacting with the setting. If the "entire thing could have been a phone call", I'd say you have a problem with the dialogue, and the character emotions. D...
@DPT's answer is great (+1), but let me add one more element to it: it's not enough that your characters interact with the setting. There needs to be a reason why your characters are there in the f...
Think of the real world, the one in which we live. How do you grow a story out of it? The answer is there's plenty of stories, it's just a question of what interests you, what moves you, what kind...
In a technical manual or documentation or anything similar, you wouldn't put emotion into the text. The only reasons to use an exclamation point are to convey strong emotion or a serious warning. ...
I've been a professional programmer for 40 years, I've written everything from operating systems to business app code to games, and I never use an exclamation point in business or OS code. Ever. No...
A simple suggestion: just adding the word "Critique" to the title may communicate a lot of what you want. Also, probably in the first minute, perhaps make it clear that: you are A Fan (and you...
You have two choices: Write it up in the same style as the other quotes but don't give an attribution. It is common enough for writers to put something poetic or otherwise different from the mai...
There are dozens of different paths and strategies to gaining a readership. Listing all of them would take some serious doing, but I can give you some easy examples. Get published by a major hous...
Amazon allows your parent to publish your book for you 4.1 Eligibility. You must have an active Program account in order to participate in the Program. You represent that you are at least 18 ...
I'd say, for a short book, pitch it as a young children's book. Imaginative and silly are great for that. Get rid of your trademark issue with Fruit Loops, come up with some other name that doesn't...
Base parts of the setting on real world cultures or locations. Unless you have near-infinite time to do your worldbuilding, you're probably going to keep coming back to our world. So start th...
Victim and suspect are both unknown and unrelated to my protagonist. It's because of this that the answer is maybe. Sometimes a prologue (not Chapter 1) with unrelated characters helps set th...
I would add a paragraph for each story under the story title, then separated from the story by a line or something like that. Like how many cookbooks do it. Sometimes they explain about the recip...
If the scene is supposed to be dramatic, a joke is out of place. Personally I did not find it funny, I thought it cliché. As a professional author and teacher, I am NOT in favor of the idea that ...
