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It's okay to have words and alien creatures that your readers don't know about, but if your description cannot teach readers something new or inspire them to picture something, it is empty verbiage...
Yes. In fact, it's inevitable that you'll have to leave some details up to your reader's imagination; describing every little detail takes up a lot of space on the page and you can only fit so many...
Having googled Kurt Vonnegut's writing tips, I found several different explanations of tip #5. Since all explanations have some merit (as far as being useful advice), and since I don't know which o...
As others have suggested increasing the length of the name in letters and adding markings (accent marks, apostrophes, et al.) may help make the names more distinctive. In some cases this can be acc...
The question you should be asking is not how big a change this is in the world, but how big a setback it this for the protagonist and how does it impact his/her moral arc. The basic structure of st...
What you want in a beta reader is someone who you trust to tell you the truth in the spirit of helping you improve, without attempting either to stroke or destroy your ego. You can't trust friend...
None of the things you list are character flaws. They are forms of disability. A person can suffer multiple physical and psychological disabilities and still be of stirling character. A character f...
Usually "and" is indeed dispensable and the fact that you wrote it is a clue to check if it is. Using that sentence as an example, I can eliminate "and" with a semicolon, or a period. Usually "...
You just need your audience to sympathize with your protagonist. This sympathy can be based on shared identity, or shared personality aspects, or shared goals. Consider the one-panel comics with ...
First: Allow re-asking of old questions. I've always felt it was odd to say "that question has already been asked--search the archives instead of asking it again." If someone has a question, they l...
I think this would particularly help in this "new site, imported content" stage. There are a lot of questions and answers that are old and valuable. They all started here at score 0 (that's by de...
Some of the stuff you write is going to suck. Some of it is going to be without substance or inconsistent or just dull. And some of it is going to be brilliant in conception but dreadful in executi...
The issue with learning a language is that you need to walk before you can run. You need the simple, repetitive exercises so you can learn the building blocks of the language. In high school Fren...
My answer will be simple but hard to execute Show to world around them. For example toilets would be "seaters" only (dunno name in english), no man toilets at all - It would all be just one door ...
This answer is my opinion, not moderator/admin edict. Voting and feedback in comments still apply. Their site description says the site is for publishers and readers of ebooks. Anything about publ...
Aside from the challenges category, it crossed my mind that it'd be nice to have a place where people can share works for feedback (or just to share). For instance, if I've put together a short sto...
Outside the window, the courtyard, small and dim. And - bright skies and blossoms
Assertions about quality from the creator of a work, whether it's a blog, a novel, a video, a podcast, or anything else, are not convincing because of the conflict of interest. Even if your work i...
That he has no ambitions to heroism or adventure doesn't mean he has no ambitions at all. It just means that his ambitions are of a different type. Maybe he has the ambition to learn everything he ...
Yes, the first page is vitally important. It is the place where engagement happens. It is the place where the reader either sinks into the world of the story or skates of the words without engaging...
Travel writing is not about the destination or about the journey, it is about the company. It is the personality of the travel writer that make travel writing worth reading. Otherwise, you might ju...
I wrote a blog post a little while back about what it means for a reader to identify with a protagonist: https://gmbaker.net/avatar-friend-and-shrink-three-modes-of-reader-intimacy/ I identified t...
If this is a formal academic work, there is likely a style guide which addresses this, or an editor who has final say. If not, adopt a convention and explain it the first time you bring in a trans...
A response to something you didn't ask: you're obviously very inspired and you will probably get a lot out of continuing to produce text while you're still full of ideas! Most people are not full o...
In the hot questions, it is not clear what are actual questions and what are Meta questions (well, if the title starts with Suggestion, it probably is meta). It would be nice if Meta questions woul...
