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Writing your short story as a standalone is highly useful. You want your story to be readable by as wide an audience as possible, so you don't want to depend on readers having already read your nov...
In my own very brief experimentation with poetry, I always found it helpful to start with the image, the symbolism, as it were. So I wouldn't be "giving my poem more symbolism" - I'd start with the...
Don't write it in. What readers do in their own fan responses is on them, not on you, and you can't prevent people from shipping anyone they like. But if you don't want canonical romance, just......
In the rebooted Jughead comic (in the Archie Comic Universe), Jughead is explicitly Ace. He tries dating someone (they were in a burger costume), but realized, "nope, not me." I really love how d...
The most famous ship of all (perhaps the one that started it) is K/S aka Kirk/Spock. Even though both characters have been portrayed as 100% straight. Many other characters have been shipped in...
Translating your own work using GoogleTranslate is not plagiarism, any more than hiring someone to translate your work would be considered plagiarism. (In the latter case, you would insert a line s...
In general, sex is a very repetitive act, and describing the sexual action is as difficult to do as any repetitive action, like a character digging a hole for an hour, or a character searching thro...
Let me start with an example, a famous one: Then there was the smell of heather crushed and the roughness of the bent stalks under her head and the sun bright on her closed eyes and all his lif...
Is it possible to narrate a novel in a faux-historical style without alienating the reader? Presuming you mean "the majority of readers", I don't think this is possible. Most readers of ficti...
I agree with all the other answers so far, but let me take a different perspective on the whole thing. If you wish, read this answer as a frame challenge. You say "there's a movie in your head". W...
If this is a true-love-lost story, then too much imagery (especially bloody or especially realistic and repellent sickness) will ruin the romance. It is not generally done, the dying partner is typ...
To answer this question, I think it would be useful to look at The Lord of the Rings. We are explicitly told that Frodo is "chosen" for the task: Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by it...
Disabled people fear losing functionality as much as anyone else. Perhaps even more so, because they need to rely on existing functional parts more strongly than others do. What you want to avoid...
One approach is to give the chosen one a flaw that she must overcome. It is fine if she has ability. I agree with Mason Wheeler; special ability, particularly ability that demands training and atte...
This is a hard one. You really need to go to another country and spend a couple days hanging out on base and seeing how they do things. Obviously, travel is expensive and you may not have other p...
I have heard of some American military soldiers in the field keep blogs, you might search for them. Although I heard they shut that down a few years ago for soldiers in combat zones. I was raised...
Screenplays have less dialogue than you think! I too used to think that a screenplay was all about the dialogue. But when I researched the medium, I discovered that dialogue is just a part of the...
There's multiple pitfalls to consider here: The first is the Uncanny Valley concern you mention in the OP - actually being able to write in the style of the time period to a suitable level of accu...
It's fiction. It's probably closest to memoir, which is basically autobiography, a type of non-fiction. But then you say: The exact course of events in the story has never really happened in ...
By offering multiple endings to your story, you are distancing the reader from the story, and breaking their immersion. In effect, you are saying, very loudly, as the narrator: "it could be that X ...
What is a draft? I mean that sincerely. And I mean it as a frame challenge. Advice about numbers of drafts and other rules about writing usually comes from pretty old advice that doesn't apply...
If you want to be PC, stick to symptoms of infectious diseases, where the sense of body horror would reinforce prevention and be justified as a mean towards avoiding contagion. As the OP suggests,...
I'm a discovery writer (no plan!) and I seldom have this problem. I would suggest actually writing less on the plan. The issue, which discovery writing takes care of automatically, is that main c...
Romeo and Juliet is in the public domain. And it's not even the source material - Shakespeare borrowed the story from somewhere else, (Pyramus and Thysbe is one very similar story, and Ovid didn't ...
Will they come after you? Very unlikely, but not impossible. It's my reader who bothers criminal organizations, it's not me. My reader is what they don't want. The fact that, in this moment, we...
