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About a year ago I started developing something like an alternative world. About two months a go I finally found some time for more work on this theme and now I am collecting information from few s...
For the occasional use of inner voice, Italics are usually recommended. However I have a protagonist who is speaking with himself all the time, and Italics use quickly becomes tiring and distract...
Successful example: Arthur C. Clarke's Rama series. The first book, Rendezvous with Rama, read to me like a history book written 50 years from now. Very hard sci-fi, technical, a bit dry. The next ...
If you write a history, it will likely be of interest only to yourself (or as preparation for your book). That's not necessarily a reason not to write it. JRR Tolkien put years of effort into wor...
I have the same problem and still do. Readers are normally drawn to characters of setting and unique history...at least at first. Its better to develop the character in the early part of the book ...
You should be a Novelist. Novels get optioned as screenplays. Authors can be involved in that; Stephen King was writing for the recent TV series based on his book, Under the Dome. It isn't easy t...
You would only capitalize dragon in this instance if it meant something other than "generic name for fire-breathing reptile of fantasy." For example, in Gregory Maguire's alternate history of Oz ...
The ring in LOTR is not a symbol. Because of the timing of its publication many took the ring to be a symbol for the bomb, but Tolkien denied this, and the history of composition makes it impossibl...
I don't want to embellish, and it would go against my ethics to stray into creative writing in a non-fiction account I think you're off-base here. Memoirs (which is what you're writing) are n...
It is very hard for me to ask this without an overwhelming amount of information on how the plot goes, so this is just a warning of what's ahead... I am writing a fictional story which begins with...
I have almost completed a high fantasy novel that I have spent over 10 years designing the world and everything that works in the story. It is the first of a trilogy and therefore has a main story ...
Find an editor and ask that person to help you find a spot to split it. This absolutely can be done; David Eddings's Belgariad series was originally planned to be three books and his publisher had...
Opening extracts or poems give a slightly old-fashioned feel to a book, so if that's the goal, it could work. In Dune, the extracts are a constant reminder that this is a story of an epic struggle ...
I'm in the early stages of a story with a large number of characters, a complex backstory and a long history. This is mostly because I crafted the world myself for months before deciding to write i...
I'm writing a paper for National History Day in my Social Studies class and am using MLA formatting. It occurred to me that I had a lot of differing information from some sources, such as a histori...
First of all, every main character in the history of the world has to change in a certain way. That's how you know your character has grown. Whether it be coming out of their shell, growing up, o...
Whether I am watching, reading, writing or telling a story, I always pay attention to internal coherence in the characters' behaviour (and of course I am not the only one). By writing and readin...
Tell more stories. If you've built a world, put sentient beings in it and put conflicts in front of them. Let the world unfold in front of your characters, and let the characters talk about the o...
But I can't have the narrator simply lie to the reader Sure you can. That's called an unreliable narrator. Instead of having a generic narrator-to-reader chapter, your "The Story So Far" mate...
I've never been entirely sure what the distinction between plot driven and character driven is supposed to mean. Story is the intersection of character and event. Character without events is psycho...
Is it possible? sure. It is your novel, so structure it as you will. Is it wise? probably not. Prologues are theives which steal from their creators. They steal the backstory and motivations wh...
Plagiarism is an academic violation. If you wrote a scholarly article for a professional journal and did not give proper credit to your sources, you would be guilty of plagiarism. If you were caugh...
I am trying to create a documentary about the history of a sports team, and have identified some compelling story arcs. However, as we know in reality, stories do not begin and end one at a time: ...
To me, the phrase Show don't Tell can have only one clear meaning, and it comes down to what it means to show. Show means to describe what the reader would see for themselves if they were present i...
I would make a distinction between linguistic drift and anachronistic references. You cannot write a story about the middle ages in Middle English because no one speaks Middle English anymore. That...
