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One element is if you characters have a reason to notice these things. In Ward, the protagonist is a bit of a Fashion Police, so she's always commenting on what people are wearing, whether regular...
Don't give a trigger warning in a book! Unless you're writing an actual nonfiction guide for rape survivors, a warning like that would be not just unnecessary but apt to get you ridiculed. It's s...
I think you need to do light research, unless you already know the answers. For example, suppose you thwart the assassination of JFK (Stephen King already wrote that book). We know what happened (...
I think you have to decide what lines you're willing to cross and which ones you aren't. It's your piece; it belongs to you. Unless you have a contract for Work for Hire or something else saying i...
You must completely finish your manuscript, and be ready for it to be published as-is. There may be some changes requested, they may fix things, but don't submit something you think needs work. Sub...
You say you've been lucky - nobody has given you a cause to hate them. Now imagine someone, or some group, laid deliberate, continuous, unjust abuse on someone(s) you cared about. Or imagine your o...
Perhaps you understand hate, you just call it something else. Anger, distain, avoidance, disappointment, shock...these can all have elements of hate in them. Anger especially. The word "hate" ha...
In my opinion, you should. It's a good thing to plan ahead for sequels, but a first draft is not a finished book. There are at least two reasons that I can see to edit before going forward: Y...
Trilogies are rarely, if ever, published back-to-back. Instead, first one book is published, then, if it is successful, the second one, then the third. What this means is, when you query an agent,...
The light is inside him; it just needs a path out. Not a big gaping doorway that opens all at once, but small tendrils. Think "many drips carve a rock", not sudden change. How do you do that? I...
You've got a plot planned out, you've got several scenes that you see vividly, you want to get them on paper, because they burn like a fire in your bones. Great. Now that you've done that, you must...
Writing is like a dance. I love ballet and modern and other dance forms but, way too often, it's all about the tricks. Triple pirouette. Step step. Leap high in the air. Step. Look! my leg is to...
In Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane, chapter 7, the MC is seven years old, and his father attempts to drown him. 'I'll apologise,' I told him. 'I'll say sorry. I didn't mean what ...
There is no fixed number of drafts. I go through several drafts, (I've done twenty, in the past), to correct problems I know I have persistently in writing. 1) Writing off the top of my head, I te...
Skipping hours, days, months, even years, is standard in fiction. In fact, it is narrating non-stop through the tedious everyday that's non-standard. How do you skip time then? Think of every sce...
If your issue is with the telling of the passing of time, then you could try to show it. This is done by relating events or facts that the reader know would take a certain amount of time to happen...
You want a group's symbolism and ideology to mesh together. That's not hard at all. Start with the group's core idea. What is it that they are, most of all? If you could sum up their "ideology" in...
It is a long way from wishing someone dead, to being able to actually do it. Even having set out to kill that company-owner, can your businessman really pull the trigger? Based on this, I would ex...
Yes, it is credible. Grief is a horrible thing and losing a child is just about the very worst thing that can ever happen to you. Grief can make you do and say pretty horrible things. The best c...
Before we even consider redemption, you should consider the credibility of your character. We consider any murderer to be deranged and in need of either correction or assistance. For a non derange...
After you're done reading the sonnets, you can check your newly learned words against this reference of Common Words & Phrases in Shakespeare's World: https://learn.lexiconic.net/shakewords.ht...
I would do some research first. But what some might call research, others would call fun reading. So, yeah, you should have a decent grasp on the real world history first. As well as a basic u...
While it sounds like what you're writing is not Creative Nonfiction, this essay about it may help clarify your self-description: https://www.creativenonfiction.org/online-reading/what-creative-nonf...
Here's the problem with what you are proposing: What you should be telling, what your readers want to read, is your actual story. Symbolism is a tool you use to tell that story: by using the symb...
You may be interested in experimental literature -- not everyone is into writing for the sake of Standard Storytelling. I adore 4th-wall breaking theater, such as "Six Characters in Search of a...
