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"Write and cite" is good practice that you should start getting accustomed to early on. The longer the piece you write, the more sources you would have to juggle. Now, imagine there are twenty arti...
Sometimes when someone asks "which should I do first when writing?" the answer is "whichever one you want." For example, I'm writing a historical novel requiring a lot of research. While I'm a re...
You've said it yourself: 18 = life. It follows that had there only been 17 travellers, they would not have come home alive. Preferably every child, but particularly the stowaway, must have a crucia...
How difficult/dangerous is their quest? You can have the 18 travelers manage to escape from dangerous situations unhurt time and time again, and generally keep having miraculously good luck. Simila...
I see two parts to your question: signaling that 18 is significant, and signaling why it is significant. Assuming that you'll have Jewish readers too, don't skimp on the first part -- you want to ...
You can use factorization. Some task takes 6 groups of 3, say making camp. Another takes 3 groups of six, say one group of six stands watch while the other two sleep. At some point, they divide int...
Certainly it's okay to have people (or animals) die in middle-grade fiction. I mean, Bambi (the movie) is rated G and young Bambi sees his mother murdered before his eyes. Ditto with dad in The L...
It depends on your intended audience. If your audience is literature professors, then you can use pretty long and complex sentences, as long as you make sure that they are reasonably well-written....
An example of an interesting story with an unlikeable/unsympathetic POV character is The Stranger, by Albert Camus. The POV character (Meursault) is fairly detached from the action - there's no emo...
A real-life case of this (not a self-help book but a cookbook) is the book (and movie) Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. Julie Powell's book is about her experienc...
It seems to me many paranormal stories (like possession, or demons on Earth) just begin with the paranormal, period. In The Exorcist a child is possessed and must be cured. In The Omen, Damien (th...
You have two problems here: Lots of good people dying, "on stage" - in front of the children Good people killing other good people The first is dealt with very well in The Hobbit, for example...
This kind of killing is never done with a light heart. While you can easily jump over the act itself, you can show the turmoil and torment that goes through the mind of those that have to execute i...
Epilogues are very common in a variety of novels, as well as movies (sometimes they're filmed, sometimes they're prose on the screen). My own novel has both a prologue and an epilogue, but I guess...
You might choose to do a series of vignettes. Break the novel down into many short chapters, each one with a different set of characters. You won't be spending much time on any one character but...
Like @Rasdashan, I am a discovery writer. My characters take shape as I write. You might find that this approach works for you too. That said, since you wish to write about a group of characters, ...
Hide their goals. You are writing about professionals. They would be less than amateurs in their line of business if they were to reveal their goal so easily. In fact, revealing one's goal gives t...
Names are almost never globally unique. This is true whether the owner chooses or the owner's parents do. Author Alex Feinman even has a note on his web site (.net) saying "looking for the other ...
Follow the rules set out on the page you want to copy from. The railway schedule is part of the Bob MacIntosh Collection. Bob has given the DARDPI wiki permission to use his image collection ...
I think the reader has to like the POV character. Everything is seen through their eyes and thoughts and feelings. If those are repellent to the reader, they cannot identify, and without that, I th...
My approach (which I have taken) would be to abandon that story, think much more about Cindy the Vampire, and write a story in which she is the sole hero, and her anger and explosions end up having...
One option is to move the twist even earlier in your story! If you want to focus primarily on Hero 2, compress Hero 1's journey into just the prologue. Not necessarily literally the first chapter, ...
In The Neverending Story, Michael Ende faces a somewhat similar challenge: the main character, Bastian, gets his hands on a book, and the narrative alternates between the book Bastian is reading, a...
I think of an ellipsis as a moment in which emotion and feeling overwhelms narrative thought. That is how it is being used here, a pause for the narrator induced by internal sensation (desire) and ...
Edited in response to OP's edit: I think it would be a mistake to tell them who, and I think it would be a mistake to go with an agent that is only prompted to read your full manuscript because an...
