Search
We all know some common symbolism: For instance, red stands for anger, blood, and violence. The cross stands for martyrdom and sacrifice. Common symbols are easy to notice, but what if you decided ...
Premise: I believe that breaking genre expectations can alienate readers. If you go into a book expecting one thing and get another thing out of it - especially if that other thing is the complete ...
This is something of a companion question to How does one write from a minority culture? A question on cultural references I have recently had a somewhat unpleasant experience reading Naomi Novik'...
I've come across a problem with one of the main characters in my book. The "heroine" of my story starts out as an apathetic self-absorbed hacker, who seeks adrenaline thrills to find meaning in her...
If you use an old expression like "by a many", do you need to make it consistent and use old expressions throughout the poem, or is it ok to just use it in one verse or sentence? “The spring is...
I'm writing a work which is bookended by a frame story with an unreliable narrator. How do I prevent confusion for the reader when the frame narrator interjects? In the framed story, the character...
I have been communicating with three PoD companies. I was considering the first, it has been in business for years and provides a certain number of copies to the author, the rest are sold from th...
One of my main character's traits is that she has some superstitious beliefs. That trait is not essential to the MC, but everyone in the era of my story is. I'm contemplating a plot point near the ...
I had a few experiences with what-if style brainstorming technique. In those exercises, I found I got lost in minute details. I'd like to know if this is a good price to pay for the thought pouring...
I have a scene in a upcoming novel where two people play a game of chess, and I realized how difficult it was to describe it. The problem is due to the fact that there are many pieces and you can't...
There are occasions where you basically just start a chapter with a short descriptive passage and go straight to dialogues, so in those situations I am not sure how to deal with acronyms in dialogu...
In my interactive novel, I'm trying to keep the word count between choice prompts fairly short and consistent, but that means sometimes breaking up longer text into a few sections…. I've been usi...
My story is set in the US. Would it be believable to the reader if I deviated from the norm that is also supported by demographic data? How many of the following deviations can I get away with? ...
I've heard and read from many vlogger and blogger authors that an aspiring writer should have his own webpage as early as possible. Being published or not doesn't come to it. Now, if I created a w...
I try to write on various Q&A sites, but now I am thinking about having my own blog website. The main thing is that I don't know exactly what my niche topics would be for blogs. I write on vari...
I have seen many blog post authors who tend to write a short teaser to present to the reader and keep them keen on reading more about the topic. Some bloggers tend to write a teaser with respect to...
Let's say I have a character in my story simply called "Slime Monster". With every instance of these two words, I want both words to be capitalized and to be corrected as a pair, so if I mistype it...
Does it get too confusing if you include the narrator’s short story that she is writing within the body of her main story?
I'm an undergraduate student of psychology. My teachers assign writing assignments from time to time, and usually require some minimum of cited sources in APA format (as expected). When I start wr...
In my story, 12 year old Ruth has visions from another place and time which lead her to gather a group of kids for a quest. She is told there will be 18 kids, but she can only find 17 with the spe...
In a comment to my post here, Cyn mentions wishing to avoid implying that the characters might all die, because she's writing for a mid-grade audience. Which made me wonder. I remember reading Th...
I have heard many times that you should always keep the sentence length to the minimum as possible, as it makes reading easy, fast and more important understandable to readers. I'm wondering: What...
I just want to be clear on this before I do any sort of writing with regards to the subject. So I have an idea for a novel that shows a person trying to obtain his objectives using the lessons and...
Building on the definition of a Paranormal Story (as opposed to Dark Fantasy) described in the answers here: What are most common tropes of a paranormal book and dark fantasy book?. A paranormal ...
Galastel did a spin off question based on one of mine. Mortal danger in mid-grade literature. And hers has spurred a new one for me. This is an issue I've been grappling with for a while and I sti...
