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I'm wondering why you want to ensure that readers don't interpret. Readers, and especially fans, love to discuss fan theories and interpretations. The discussion of fan theories about Game of Thron...
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...
All things can be a symbol... And sometimes what you intend it to be a symbol for is not what people take it to mean. For example, if I describe my main character's room as having blue walls or b...
Describe the scene from a person's point of view. You say this: these characters travel back in time and across the world If I were to travel back in time and across the world, then I woul...
Rather than gender diversity, I'd worry whether my characters are interesting enough to my readers. Suspension of disbelief, where well supported, would make anyone enjoy just anything. Do your c...
Most definitively! In fact these types of cultural references serve two purposes. On one hand, they are for the reader: if the reader identifies it, it may resonate with the feeling that the refe...
Personally, if I want to make a super-realistic human-like character, then I would just write a story based on reality. That is, I would look at my own personal life, study the people in my life, a...
I think there are two steps: 1. Decide the character's philosophy of life I'm using the example of two medieval characters because that's my settings of choice. Imagine we need two female chara...
I meet my characters. My MCs, I spend about a week or two imagining them in various situations. When they are fleshed out, I start writing them and see what happens and who they run into. The key ...
I have a large assortment of walk on characters who appear briefly. Some of them might return, but most will at best be referred to by another character and just disappear. I find this realistic a...
I have characters in every chapter that have personalities, and often significant and lengthy communications with the main character. They don't appear again, they are basically in the place where ...
I hate to give the old standby answer, "it all depends ..." But, it all depends. Of course in most stories there are characters who appear briefly to perform some specific function and then disapp...
To the kids, everyone's speaking English (though they know this isn't the case). I'm going to propose a slightly different solution. What if instead of perceiving everything as English, they c...
How you structure a code review depends on the tools you're using and the level of scrutiny that was requested. Instead of giving you an exact template, therefore, I'll address the different types...
I think there is some measure of the characters and their history relevant to your question. I mean, If the prince's friend knows him from childhood, and they grew up together, they would naturally...
Yes. Both of the examples you gave (more so the LotR one) "work" in their own right without the need to "get" the reference in order to continue understanding the story. The more likely a reader/...
Three good examples of this I can think of, all with very different starting points, are Miss Marvel (a comic book series with a Muslim protagonist), Ready Player One (a book about 70s nerd nostalg...
There are two issues here: plagiarism and copyright. Plagiarism is when you copy from another writer (or composer or whatever, but we're talking about writing here) without giving proper credit. I...
Legal and wise are not the same thing. Legally I believe you're in the clear. There is no trademark on government symbols. But if you use the actual symbols from the USSR, you are writing yourse...
Under US copyright law, anything created by the US government is not protected by copyright. It is automatically public domain. (There are some complexities to this that we could get into but they'...
This isn't bad style "A crown of fire" is a an evocative statement full of imagery and connotations. Instantly, I can imagine the burning ring of flame, progressing outward and reaching up to the ...
I've got nothing on shadowing (I suspect that's a very hard sell), but for asking questions, there are two (non-exclusive) approaches that I've seen and occasionally been part of (on both sides). ...
I have my own three-part rubric I've used for years for critiquing any creative project: Craft: How skillful is it? What command of the technical basics does the creator have? In terms of poetr...
Say you wrote a piece that was about something wonderful that had happened to you. A piece that exuded happiness and contentment. Someone—probably the very same person you discuss in your questio...
If you can, lose the formality. By definition, the familiar terms are, well, more familiar. Whereas formality is a constant reminder of rank. I for one felt the constant reference to Frodo as mas...
