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I always start with characters. For me, as a discovery writer, characters drive the story, when I'm looking for a new idea, I look for a new MC, until one grabs me. Then I think about that MC obse...
A knowledgeable Writing.SE user once said you could write fifty thousand times the word 'meow' and call it a novel. Such a piece of writing would hardly be considered an account of anything, even l...
In general, a first person POV is where the narrator is a character and says I pointed the gun at his head. I said, "Notice, I am taking the safety off." He spit at me. Stories have bee...
Neil Gaiman writes: Don't worry about trying to develop a style. Style is what you can't help doing. If you write enough, [...] you'll have a style, whether you want it or not. (Neil Gaiman, Th...
A villain has intention -- it's out to cause some outcome, foil the main character (if it's personal), and generally advance its own agenda. The world, on the other hand, just is, barring worlds wi...
Related writing.SE literature: Effective techniques for describing pain How to describe pain in first person? We can break down the problem into separate components. The style Increasing th...
Not a lawyer. You paid an illustrator to provide artwork for your book. You (supposedly) own the right to publish the artwork - that's what you paid the artist for. But that doesn't make you the i...
The trope you're looking for is referred to as phonetic accent, or Funetik Aksent. That is, spelling out words as they are spoken by a particular character, rather than they way they should be writ...
Show it. Using a different spelling is akin to telling: you could similarly just make a recording and ship it with your story. It does not make much sense, right? You could instead show it. Write...
I want to draw on traditional, arguably "cliché" (?) fantasy species, like elves, orcs, goblins, dwarves, faeries, etc. How can I involve some of these older elements, while leaving behind...
In general, @Galastel is correct; the problem is the costs. That said, the first Harry Potter Book by J.K. Rowling contains "illustrations", my copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" conta...
There are exceptions to the "no illustrations" trend. For example, Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel is filled with black-and-white illustrations reminiscent of the wood engravings...
Thinking about it. This bit expands on Chris Sunami's suggestion, one way to extend the dialogue is to describe the thoughts and feelings of the POV character as the dialogue progresses, or as the...
You say that in your head there are pauses in the dialogue, but in the text they just aren't there. Well then, insert the pauses. ‘How terrifying!’ said Frodo. There was another long silence. T...
+1 Galastel, Your style is literally like your voice, instantly recognizable as "you" but nearly impossible to convey to somebody else in words. It is how you, with your thought processes and train...
The answer to your question depends on your proficiency with English: to what extent you're comfortable writing in English, to what extent you enjoy writing in English compared to Swedish. Do not d...
No, they are not all of them. This is a common game, there are many books claiming there are 3 plots, 7 plots, 12 plots, 21 plots, 23 plots, whatever. You could say there is only one plot: Charact...
Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Forest House is a lose retelling of Belini's opera Norma. Several hymns were taken from the opera verbatim, something done as tribute to the source material. Zimmer Brad...
Each chapter will open on something that sets the scene to come. A descriptive paragraph (or other length) that focuses on the setting is a perfectly legitimate way to do this, but it's not requir...
Real Buddhist meditations are probably public domain (not copyrighted, or in current USA law copyright lasts for the lifetime of the author plus 70 years). Presumably they are very old meditations...
what are the important elements to consider, and how long should the description be, before getting on with the narration? The most important element to consider is why the reader is reading i...
I've always had good experiences with my Pilot Capless as something of an infrequent user (since I only use my fountain pens for pleasure writing rather than work) I've often gone several weeks wit...
I'm a discovery writer. I provide a lot of detail on beginning a story as a discovery writer, in this answer. When I began I tried to be a plotter, but it didn't work; my creativity was used up in...
If you're internally consistent this can work. A variety of books are first person, or a third person style that shows the character's thoughts enough that it has the intimacy of first person, but...
One doesn't "decide" to be a plotter or a discovery-writer ("pantser" is not considered a polite term in writing circles). One is one or the other, or somewhere on the scale between the two. Some ...
