Search
The main thing to remember about critiquing somebody's writing is to not critique the person. What the piece is about is not a topic for criticism; what you think it says about the person that wrot...
Speaking as a research scientist, one major refinement you would need is rejection of your gods. In 400BC, Aristotle published his theory of gravity; based on the notion that objects were composed ...
I use a double-dash, and specifically a double-dash (not an em dash), on both sides of the interruption. The demon -- he? she? -- gestured toward the supply wagons. Although in your example, ...
I would do this like names from the culture. Different languages have different characteristic sounds, rhythm, and accents. Although I don't speak Spanish, Italian, German, French, Arabic or Mandar...
ARCHIVOS might be what you want. (Free account lets you build a world!) It allows you to create scenes, establish relationships between them. Characters (and relationships with them), plus a time...
I'd reject the advice to write to a sixth grade level, unless you are writing for kids or young-adults. I've seen the stats on reading levels in the USA somewhere; they must be online. But as I rec...
Write for your audience. There are certainly many audiences who might not have the literacy level (or education) to do well or want books written at a upper secondary school level or higher educat...
Prologues are usually boring, because they are almost inevitably history lessons that have no suspense or action and they feel like a history lesson, right after lunch, and a snooze fest. You woul...
Embrace it instead, and make the reader suffer for having even thought of it What you have there is a reader's commitment to a goal. They expect two characters to get together from page 1, and in ...
You cannot prevent that suspicion altogether; especially because that is your plan. Which means your two characters are heterosexual; so you can't really use homosexuality as a show-stopper. I wou...
I am not a lawyer, so this is not legal advice, but my understanding as an author is if somebody else can convince a jury that, for people that know the real person, the character in the book could...
This is one thing I think English needs: the "Ammoc" -- it looks like a comma, but backwards. It's used to indicate when one feels that for breath or speaking issues, a pause is needed, but it gra...
Trying it yourself is free. Don't send out fifty queries! Typically, the advice from agents is to find the agents that match your story (MSWL = www.manuscriptwishlist.com; another collection is ag...
What you describe in the question sounds perfectly fine to me. So if other people are telling you (or you're telling yourself) that it's not quite right, the problem isn't what you're doing, it's ...
Social media is no longer sci-fi In years gone past concepts like the internet would be considered sci-fi. Many book exist which use digital communication on a global scale as part of a sci-fi set...
It isn't science fiction, it is just Contemporary fiction, aka Realistic fiction. A Science Fiction story must rely heavily on some non-existing tech or some reasonably plausible guess at a futuri...
1. The issue In my opinion the issue is a strong prevalence of telling rather than showing. All I read in the OP was the description of some fancy lava lamp. To a reader it does not strike any em...
I never used the snowflake method myself, even if I gave it a look sometime ago. The problem with your abstract and concrete goals is that one is the specialization of the other. After all "kill...
I think an abstract goal needs to be more useful as a life philosophy than you can make "vengeance." If that is my life goal, what do I do on idle Sundays, ask neighbors if I can take some vengeanc...
Ditch the omniscient viewpoint Tension comes from the unknown possibilities. By using an omniscient viewpoint the readers don't feel any of the tension the characters do because they already know ...
The example you give in your question is all about age and gender. And age is the one category you need to be mindful of while you write. Most people know in advance the age group they are writin...
I ran a search on Submission Grinder, Poetry, Paid. https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/Search/ByFilter?poetry=true It came up with 109 results, but almost half had no-data on response time, s...
The Writer's Market books will give you the lists of agents (with what they're looking for, contact info, etc) and articles (also in their Writer's Digest magazines and websites) on how to write th...
I think what's tripping you up is the idea that your male characters need to be characters that could not possibly be female. This probably comes from traditions of valuing what men do and devalui...
To me, uniqueness is not found in any one trait, but in the combinations of traits. You avoid writing a stereotype by acknowledging the stereotype exists, and then finding a natural way to subvert ...
