Search
Without having seen your piece, of course, I can only speculate, but I wonder if what you were doing was the opposite of predictability: You signaled you were going straight, or right, when your go...
Never, really. Or it depends on what you mean by "moving the story forward." I am writing a scene with a character that has to prove she is lethal. In a movie, we would use a walk-on, unrelated to...
I have a word count goal for my fantasy novel (climate fiction/fantasy) of 100 - 120,000 words. It doesn't need to fall in this range, but that is the typical length of books I read when I pick up ...
I'm writing a letter from the future to my dear friends, posing as the child they're about to have. The main aim of the letter is to be amusing, but also to give some perspective (you don't need to...
A letter is from the future so we are talking about science fiction. It makes us think about science, but letter is for current time and also readers are of the current time. So whatever will happe...
Plot is the servant of character. One of the most common mistakes of beginning writers seems to be to start by inventing a plot -- essentially an imaginary history -- and then peopling it with char...
The protagonist of my story is an all-powerful do gooder superhuman. She is like Wonder Woman and Amélie merged and She could literally get things done by thinking about them. She was raised by a s...
Read literature from the country or period you want to write about. If you want to write about norse mythology, open the Edda and get names there. If you want to write about the french revolution...
There are two possibilities, I see, and only one is avoidable. The first is, when I experience this (and I do fairly frequently), it is because I am tired (not fresh to the job in the morning) and ...
Updates are generally at the beginning, but different styles are possible The thing about updates in texts is that there are different ways you can do them and none of them is correct or incorrect...
I would inspire myself to existing chatbots These are just two examples that came to mind, I hope they help: Emacs psychotherapist a rather old one, asking questions on the previous statement wi...
First, what happened two to three years ago? What happened in the months after the last story you wrote? You don't have to tell me, this is for yourself to contemplate, and I am not soliciting any...
"I can't come up with anything good or worth reading." This implies you have ideas, you just think they're bad. That's irrelevant. You must write. Do you honestly think an artist just hap...
What is throwing me off is your "Without action". Do you mean without having an action scene? Without the heroes fighting directly against the villains? Here are some random ideas. Tell of the ...
Referring to history, as noted in other answers, is a good way. You don't have to depict the action to have it come up -- in conversation, when a character reads about something online, when a det...
It heavily depends on the topic. If it's about mathematics, computer science, physics, then Wikipedia is very trustworthy. If it's an article about politics, ideology, history, or any topic larg...
I'm not sure about using Git commit. I don't use it much. How about tokenizing your text in Python? Then calculate the entropy per sentence. This would show difference between sentences. Alternat...
It seems like a lot of people are asking if something is 'okay' to do in writing, and there isn't an objective answer. In Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton formats his book in an odd way that br...
Focus on the character's reactions in that moment, given his intention and state of mind as he enters that environment. Different characters would likely attend to different details, and would rea...
This does answer the OP's question: As I said in my answer, and added P.S. and P.P.S, and comments later, the only requirement is that something (significant) be original, which can include charact...
The game "Marvel: Ultimate Alliance" had a system where each side quest's outcome (and some choices that were tied to the main plot and couldn't be avoided) were recorded. At the end of a full pla...
I would normally advise to write it as you think it should be written. It is your artwork, made out of a piece of your most personal experience. Having reached the point that you feel you are ready...
I am in a sense suggesting a different but similar twist to @Stilez suggestion. It’s the aftermath. I can’t drag the antagonist into a Poirot/Sherlock Holmes style Q&A as he's already in ...
I've written myself into a sci-fi cliche which I have never seen done well: two characters meet in virtual reality. The gist of my scene is one character has been in a pseudocoma, more aware of he...
Well, there is no good practical reason for it. In other words, there are no studies showing that passive voice is more effective in communicating technical information. That leaves us with social ...
