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One such strategy is to have your villain, on more than one occasion, actual act against his own best interest and defeat his own plot, kill his own men, etc, in order to convince the hero (and the...
Ask the Hungarian TL;DR Unsurprisingly, this question has a mathematical solution based on the Hungarian algorithm. I have not done the calculations, but I imagine that1 the typical answer is: ...
I don't think it is too long, I write chapters nearly that long. Some readers (even my own) complain that they use chapters to gauge their progress through the story and as stopping points, and ve...
I put a paragraph break in your question as an edit, but it's still a huge block of text (now two huge blocks). Chapter dividers are a grander version of that. They give your reader a chance to...
Q: Do we write down problems that we address using the scientific method? A: Yes. We dump all this information on static media all the time, both for our benefit and for the benefit of others. We ...
For me, the midpoint is indeed when I shift from a reactive phase to a proactive phase, but I still need a scene, a dramatic event, that triggers this change of perspective for the MC (Main Charact...
You're taking "show, don't tell" too strictly. There's no rules in writing - they're more what you'd call guidelines. If you're in doubt about a passage, write it both ways. Then see which one fee...
I'll add to Galastel answer about the general limits of the "show don't tell" paradigm. You are indeed allowed to tell when its more natural to do so; the catch being that while there are guideline...
I would add one word to that (then I'll tell you why): Visa squared his shoulders, knowing Reino respected confidence. An opinion is part of somebody's internal life; and how they see the wor...
Finish what you start. Your instincts are correct. The more weight you give an element, any element, the more readers are going to understand it as something that will be important later on. But...
I think it is fine to shift, but I think you need a marker of some sort to ensure the reader is aware of whose POV they are in. This could be done in prose, but it might be easier to just use the ...
I think it is a mistake to write half a book as a grim fantasy, then have a twist that undoes that. To me, I am disappointed if the author builds up a dire scenario that suddenly fizzles out, the h...
There is a distinction between what the audience can logically deduce and what the audience is emotionally rooting for. The latter can make them blind to the former. A recent example is (Game of T...
Q. How to portray the downfall of [SYSTEM]? A. Show it. There are basically two steps: first some worldbuilding second the writing A note on worldbuilding. I'll just say: before even showing...
If your goal is hectic momentum, then two-sentence paragraphs with a visual indicator of "scene change" might work. Colonel Mustard frantically wiped up the table. No one would believe he hadn...
You can't plagiarize yourself. It's actually pretty common for writers to turn a short story (or several) into a novel. Your only issues are about copyright. If you self-publish the stories, you...
Every book is going to play around with reality to some degree, though some do it more than others. Every case is different. Is this a story that would end up on a "I can't believe they survived!...
For example, while writing an erotic scene, is it important for the author to feel the same way as they expect the readers to feel when describing the scene? For some subjective feelings or em...
The tropes In my opinion this is a variation of love at first sight, and of engaging conversation. The latter can be summarised by a climatic conversation ending with a love epiphany, and even a m...
I just stumbled upon https://rhymebrain.com/en Given a word it returns a section that suggests rhymes for related words. They may not synonyms, but it is the only tool I have found so far.
The short story Orange by Neil Gaiman, from his collection Trigger Warning takes your idea one step further: it's framed as a subject's responses to an investigator's written questionnaire. The que...
I would like to offer a frame challenge: you're asking "will X make my story not fit the 'dark fantasy' sub-sub-genre". I say, write your story, make it a good one, then think what genre or sub-gen...
Just Desserts From TV Tropes: A villain ultimately finds their evil deeds come back to bite them. Literally—they end up getting eaten. This does not include a Heroic Sacrifice. But may ...
It is fine to extend a sentence after a tag, and the first form is correct: "he said" should also be followed by a comma. "I don't like this at all," he said, as the door closed behind them.
Commas tell you when to breathe. They can be for actual pauses (as when you read it out loud and take a brief pause) or they can be to tell your brain how to break down the sentence. Either way, ...
