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Think about all the fiction you've read that refers in passing to real companies, brands, sports teams, games, and so on. All of those things have trademarked names, yet you can have a character d...
If you have placed your clues and foreshadowing well, you can present the final clues and let the reader draw the conclusion. You're aiming for an "oh wait, what? Oh wow..." reaction as the reade...
Magic and Wisdom share a common root, but have since diverged. The Wise Man became the Wizard. The natural philosopher similarly diverged to beget the scientist and the alchemist. Our notion of mag...
I think the point of requiring evidence of prior research is to avoid clogging up the site with endless repetitions of the same basic questions. The point of a Q/A site, or, at least, the stated go...
It is almost certainly just a really really bad idea and you should stick to either one. At novel length it has been made to work by people like Charles Dickens and Cormac McCarthy, but at short st...
Edit: fixed. The font face and size make posts too hard to read (and also, I'm now discovering, to compose). The current font face is vertically "squashed"; this is not the Arial or similar that ...
As is typical with tired language and cliches, the main problem here is not simply that the phrase is overly familiar, but that it is inappropriate to the scene. This is not a scene in which two pe...
ANSWER: Yes, and an easy way to make this work is by accentuating 'other goals.' If the necessity of developing those relationships is clear (at least implicit) as character goals, and if we see ...
Why do baddies have to be bad? (Because that is the question you are really asking here.) Baddies have to be bad because baddies serve an important literary function. Robert E. Lee said, "It is w...
I think you need to distinguish four aspects of writing and focus on the ones that you most want to improve on. They are: The mechanics of writing: Sentence structure, punctuation, etc. For this ...
Having your own "voice" shine through your writing is important in order to make your reader remember you. If you read through your favourite books and favourite blogs you will find that every auth...
By their fruits ye shall know them, but the works of their hands. What follows a character, despite the many masks they may wear, is their goals and their modus operandi. If the character acts th...
There's a limit (100, IIRC) on the number of tags that appear in the list to stop performance going down the drain. That means it only extends into the C's by default. However, if you start typing,...
I think you need to make a distinction between a change of character and a change of heart. Characters, inherently, don't have changes in character, because they are characters and character is all...
Family and friends are not ideal beta readers, not only because they are more interested in preserving their relationship with you personally, but also because they are not necessarily your target ...
Your example is first-person narration in the past tense. That is, your narrator is reporting events that previously happened. At the time of the events, the narrator thought the walls were movin...
It depends on what you mean by evil. There are many characters in fiction which exist only as the personification of evil. They are not people, they are evilness in trousers and a mourning coat. Yo...
A wise writer chooses a point of view that enables the reader to see what they need to see of the story. If you choose a point of view arbitrarily, or because it is fashionable, you will often find...
These are great answers. I'd just add (as a sub-answer) that a brown couch is sort of like a happy smile. The adjective doesn't add much of value. It implies nothing much about the couch, or the sm...
I don't disagree with the existing answers. The other answer (your additional tools) is to put the dark theme into the title, or cover art, or book blurb. We tend to think the document on our comp...
I think the answer will vary on your specific situation. There are many 'in-betweens,' between not hiring an editor and hiring an editor. If you do hire an editor, that editor needs to be a good ...
You can. You are writing a critique of something, and that is the thing in the title. I could write an article "Cash Bail" and argue how cash bail (in the USA) is discriminatory because it allows...
Always maintain some distance between yourself and the character. Ensure that the character is somebody you can empathize with, but somebody who is fundamentally and emphatically not you. As in "I ...
I would say that the humble person should down play a thing they should be proud of, only to be admonished after the down play. The animated film "Superman: Doomsday (2008)" has a great example......
Humility is the best when shown, not told. Design a scenario when your character has something that any normal person would brag about, only that he/she is never bragging. It is the best if the ot...
