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At a bare minimum, you need a central landing place to direct people to in your marketing. The important items you want to cover are: Title and brief description (genre, audience) of your book. ...
I really love the dialogue in the Guest translation of the Mabinogion, it adds to the feeling that you are reading a text from a different time: A horseman spoke to Pwyll. "...," said he. "...," s...
A comic -- web or paper, cartoon strip or sophisticated graphic novel -- is a different medium from conventional written stories. The biggest difference is that it's hard to do exposition; those l...
Daniel's answer is good, but I have an additional "yardstick" which may be helpful: Part of art, of any art form, is inviting the audience to contribute. It's even been said this is what makes it...
A book can be a puzzle or it can be an experience. If it is an interesting puzzle, and you are the kind that likes puzzles, the puzzle may pull you through to the end. But once you reach the end, t...
No one needs to do anything. It is your story. There are plenty of stories without death. One option that could also allow you to go on with a series is to have it so the Antagonist is "Driven out ...
For the sort of poor soul who can only enjoy themselves if they are rooting for one side in a fight, then I suppose that a story that does not take sides will be boring. But that is not and never...
I have developed a sci-fi/fantasy mixed universe with many characters, good amount of background lore and I have a plot for at least two different stories each for a single/multi novel length. So f...
I have resorted more than once to citing Neil Gaiman's 2012 address Make Good Art. Let me quote from it here too: The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street na...
There are sites where artists who do book covers list themselves as looking for work. And there are individual websites or social media for various artists. Look around and find someone you like,...
Many poets pair their artwork with their prose, probably the most notable is Rupi Kaur in her bestselling poetry collection Milk and Honey. Here, here, and here are some examples of her poetry and...
Write what you want to write: Accept what people want to read into it This is a balancing act, but ultimately we're in La mort de l'auteur territory here. Ultimately, readers are going to... read...
Stop being an Indian writer, and become a writer. There is an Elton John bio movie coming out. He was born Reginald Dwight and changed his name. In one of the preview clips somebody tells Reginald ...
First person narration is a gross violation of common sense. I say this simply to point out that all forms of narrative, or almost all, are a gross violation of common sense. Who is telling this st...
The questions you need to answer are: What story do I want to tell? What elements do I need to have available to tell it? If you want to tell your backstory, and it stands alone, then you ha...
One of the problem areas that I face while writing my novel is that I often get stuck when writing descriptions. I do well when writing action sequences, when writing dialogues, when showing charac...
I have roughly 30 speaking characters; about ten speak often enough that their voices should be well defined. I have compiled, from web sources, various considerations when building distinct charac...
That's a thing I read often about on Twitter from colleagues. The most common approach is: Let your character do what he wants. There is a reason that your character developed this way and make way...
In a series, I expect to find one of three approaches: a) One single plot that covers the entire series and which is divided into smaller parts in order to give each book some level of closure b)...
I have found that the approach varies, depending on your intent. If you believe that the person will listen to you, then you want a friendly approach. "Dear stack exchange, I have been engaged in...
Historical re-enactors share your problem. Here are some of the things we do: Read history books, sure, but sometimes it's the museum catalogs that show everything from art to architecture to eve...
Prologues are usually boring, because they are almost inevitably history lessons that have no suspense or action and they feel like a history lesson, right after lunch, and a snooze fest. You woul...
I am a discovery writer. The main and broad definition is that a discovery writer does not outline stories beat by beat, or chapter by chapter, or even Act by Act. The reason for this, as I found ...
I am new to this forum and would like to share one of my short novel here. I would love to hear any comments and thoughts (e.g., how the story flows, any better way to describe the atmosphere? and ...
This XKCD strip shows a visualization approach for tracking character interactions -- who's with whom when. It works pretty well even with a complex plot with many characters (one of the examples ...
