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If your editor says something might look unprofessional, you should listen to your editor. Your editor is a professional, whose task is precisely to make your work appear at its best. We, on the ot...
I look at the first sentence as the "airport giftshop hook". If someone's got 5 minutes to kill before their flight, and wants to find an interesting read, how much of a hook is your first sentence...
The first page of your novel is vitally important, but not necessarily because the action starts there. The first page, and first several pages, should: set your tone and reader expectations. In ...
Phonetic spellings. Or something similar to that. Phonetic rendering. Spelling phonetically. Etc. A few resources for you: How to convey accents in fiction writing: Beyond phonetic spelling ...
Absolutely. My own book is filled with references to Judaism and to American Jewish culture (the number 18 is one). In lots of those cases, it's explicit, but not always. I would venture to say ...
Sure. There are two possibilities. Oh, you used religion as the example so let's continue with that example. Similar things would apply to an ethnic heritage, or for that matter to the subculture ...
How about a three ring binder? It would make it easy to insert a new chapter, although it won't solve the issue of needing to make edits. Perhaps you can have list of notes at the beginning for ke...
Yes, it's fine. I would set it off though. Italics might work. Or an indented blockquote style. Or a divider between that line and the rest of the story. You might also make it a fake quote. ...
By not making her a victim. One friend I had lived most of her life in a wheelchair, had no motor control and would punch and kick her caregiver until her hands and feet were bound to the chair. P...
Grammar is there to help The first thing you need to realize is that the rules of grammar are there to help. Following them makes your writing clearer and easier to understand. Not following them ...
I use the "medium" size in Wordpress, which is 500 px width and height proportional as required by the image. This fits across my entire column (depending on the monitor/window size/browser of cou...
Sure you can! People do it all the time. To use your own example of Abraham Lincoln, there was a film from a few years ago (adapted from some other medium) depicting him as a part-time vampire hun...
I'm going to use the example of one of my all-time favourite anime, Steins;Gate, which also has two inciting incidents. The first is Okabe accidentally inventing the time machine and shifting hims...
The problem you're describing actually has an associated TV Trope: the One Mario Limit (obligatory warning, now that I've added a link). Some names become so strongly associated with one character/...
If you need to convey specific information to the reader without resorting to an omniscient info-dump while staying in a third person POV your choices are indeed limited (pun intended). Your MC ca...
Ask his wife Either you're so much inside his head that you're not seeing him the way others do, or you're an outsider suffering from hero worship. You need to get into other people's heads and s...
This is tricky, because you can't explain the way magic without, you know... explaining the way magic works. The trick is to make it interesting. I think one of the best examples I've seen comes ...
This is a complex question. The business of balancing information and story is always tricky. One good approach is to give minimal information, then bury further descriptions in the course of the...
I wanted to give another answer that goes in a different direction than my first. Write down every detail about what you're dumping about. Then look at each detail. Is it REALLY vital that the char...
I imagine that you Master Thesis is about something, which is presented in a consequential manner. I would take the same order in which you describe your work and write the state of the art, point ...
Do the simplest thing that works, which in this case is example 3. The rules of sentence structure don't really cover these kinds of things. That is a defect of the rules of sentence structure, not...
Paul, thank you for asking this question. I have the same concerns, and thinking about them helped me clarify some things for myself. Maybe my thoughts can be of help to you, too. I assume that yo...
I think you'll find that TrueNovelist just about fulfils your requirements. Free, online with a management suite. Here's some blurb from the site Organize your writing and research in a way th...
See if you can add a twist. One time Harlan Ellison wrote: She looked like a million bucks. Realizing what a horrible cliche that was, he changed it: She looked like a million bucks, tax ...
I recently finished reading a novel in translation to English from Russian. The title was in Latin (in the original edition, the title was transliterated to Russian, but the English edition was in...
