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People choose words to make distinctions. Sometimes the distinctions they are trying to make are fine-grained and sometimes they are not. In many cases, the people making the coarse-grained distinc...
Imagine it in terms of the types of stories you would tell your friends. If it is a sequence of events go screenplay (had a crazy night last night, this happened then this happened then this happe...
When writing essays for History class, 5 points are taken off for every contraction. I don't see why writing it fully out is better than using a contraction, since it's shorter and it doesn't affec...
While I do see avoiding contractions completely as fairly arbitrary for expository writing in a History class, in a composition or creative writing class, there is a case to be made for seemingly a...
I've asked the question a few times before about how to get published in newspapers and magazines, and the most common response has been, by far: "what are your qualifications to write about the pi...
I suggest you start with an Innocent (or an Outsider) — a Cabbagehead kind of character, someone who doesn't know anything about your world so the world has to be explained to and/or experienced by...
The definition of the whole genre "Alternate History" is that you are mostly trying to be as realistic as possible, except for one or more historical events. It's completely up to you what those de...
One problem I notice with reading paperbacks from the past (whether from BookThing or my mom's trashy-lit shelves when I was a teen) is that they name-drop a LOT, but those names mean/meant nothing...
It very much depends on what you mean by "real people". You can, of course, make people from history into characters in fiction, as writers of historical novels do, and you can base characters on p...
I don't have this problem in my writing, but this would be my suggestion: If they are not distinguished by gender, then you need a general term any random person. I would latch onto something they ...
There are two types of LGB (and to a much lesser extent, T) characters in stories, be it books, movies or otherwise. One kind where their sexuality is the primary defining character aspect. These ...
There is also physical setting, social setting, philosophy setting, (together perhaps world building) and character building scenes. This scene is a beat, a pause in the action, that is needed, an...
Yes, there are distinct differences between pre-school-age, Middle Grade, and Young Adult fiction. If you look at how children develop from infancy to adulthood, certain ages are distinguished by ...
Well, first of all, Picasso never said it. Please see, for example, this investigation which could find no evidence to suggest Picasso ever said this. In fact, the earliest quote that could be foun...
I'm planning out an idea for a short story. In the story, slavery didn't abruptly end but instead continued to modern day and beyond. The structure of the story will be similar to The Last Question...
It is good that you have identified a problem that seems to permeate your writing. If I understand the feedback you are getting correctly, the problem is that your beta readers simply don't care f...
They have different sets of talents, different world views, different ways of handling crises. Yet despite all that sets them apart, they're the best of friends. Why are they the best of frie...
Speaking as a professor and author of several academic papers; I would avoid it. Rhetorical questions are a technique we use in classrooms to generate interest or debate among students. That is a...
You don't have to explain much in sociopathy. Read Understanding the Sociopath: Cause, Motivation, Relationship, in "Psychology Today." An excerpt: In the media, I'm often asked what causes so...
Soap Operas are like the Ouroboros, the snake that eats it's own tail and has no beginning or end. In this context, opera is a pejorative indicating too much of one thing (an opera being several ho...
I would do what people actually do, and call it something descriptive. Here is an Online Etymology Dictionary that can tell you when and how various words in the English language originated and evo...
There is a phrase that I picked up somewhere and integrated into my life. It helps tremendously with interpersonal relations, but it works for writing as well: Nobody is the villain of their ow...
So my solution to this problem was the rule that can be boiled down to the following: The Past is set in stone, the future is clay. The present is the kiln. Basically, knowledge of a future even...
It's a bit hard to give advise with so little information to base it on, but if your story is about the characters rather than the locations, and your problem is that it takes the characters to mee...
When it comes to revising/reformatting a setting bible (for a video game) to make the setting more internally consistent and better organized, which place is the best part of a setting bible to loo...
