Search
In my experience, chapter length does not matter. Your book may look more 'impressive' or 'official' with long chapters, but are they necessary to the book itself? No. As long as the first chapter ...
For color-to-name converter, a quick Google search gives me this link: http://chir.ag/projects/name-that-color/#C0C0C0 In which you can just pick a color from the color wheel to see its name. ...
I would say that you should definitely include time/date, but as was mentioned above, you should show, not tell. If you have to tell, I would use the chapter header mentioned by Mac Cooper. But act...
Please please please PLEASE use date/time of day references. Please. With chocolate on top. It's way too easy to get lost in the flow of narration and not have a damn clue when we are. Is it morn...
It depends on the kind of story you're trying to tell, and the experience you want the reader to have. I think that in your case, since you are creating characters which are meant to be read as a...
The second option is OK, if you can smooth out the phrasing. What would be more ideal is if you could rephrase to avoid the problem, to avoid lumping the two items together in the first place - fo...
Yes, it constitutes a lie, technically speaking. Yes, it is legal. The use of pseudonyms is an established practice in publishing. There's a wide range of reasons where writing under a pseudonym m...
Allow me to introduce you to Scrivener. Scrivener is a word processor which allows you to create unlimited documents within a single project, and organize them into folders. You can have each b...
Per the discussion in the comments: if you're using sentence case, I'd go with 4-terminal (lowercase T) because the 4 is the first character. (I would still flinch to see a sentence which started...
You can always have a character who doesn't develop; flat Disney villains come to mind. But the flat character is generally in opposition to the hero/ine, who does develop. So the question is, wh...
It is possible. How, I know not, but it is possible. I once wrote a story that was literally a narration of events with no character, and the community (it was a fan fiction) really liked it. I sti...
I am actually adding a second answer based on something @user16583 mentioned. In some long-running comic strips, characters don't age or change. Strips like FoxTrot and Sally Forth occasionally m...
No, because the dash (which should properly be an M-dash, like this — ) is an interrupter. You can use it at the end of a broken-off phrase, or if a sentence is interrupted, but you need some kind ...
The reason you think it's obvious is that you assume that only a woman would be having a romantic dinner with a man. Your baseline assumption is that everyone is straight. There is absolutely nothi...
Hyphens indicate a compound adjective: a do-it-yourself project. The hyphens are to let the reader know that all the hyphenated words belong to one thought. If you're using capitals to denote a pr...
Yes, if you have two POV narrators in the same section, you must at least put her POV in another paragraph. Think of it as similar to speech; if you'd put a new speaker on a new line or in a new pa...
I believe you need a nonbreaking hyphen. It'll keep the characters before and after it from breaking across lines. From Butterick's Practical Typography: Your word processor assumes that any...
Books of the last, say, 75 years are set in what's called in medias res, in the middle of things. The story starts where the plot starts, more or less. But back in, for example, Victorian novels, ...
Unlike @what, I often enjoy the extra material, particularly if you have it set up as a chapter interstitial or a page or two of introductory material before a chapter gets underway. It allows the ...
I would only capitalize "the Assault" in this context if the people involved are imbuing the event with such importance that there can only ever be one assault in their lives. It's THE assault, so ...
I much preferred reading the first-person excerpt, but that doesn't mean much when taken out of context like this. There's no simple answer here. First person has certain advantages, third person h...
Something may be a one-time event, but that doesn't mean it's capitalized. I would refer to "the assault" throughout unless you're using the book's title. "The assault that takes place in The Assau...
I would think yes, since "in order" is a bit superfluous, but there are always exceptions in context. You can probably take it out most of the time (like 85 to 90 percent).
My original thought was "Of course a good headline can have a pronoun," but wow, a bit of research shows having any pronouns in headlines is actually quite rare. NY Times: Moving Your Show to Bro...
If you can't boil down your novel into a logline (or "elevator pitch," which is how I learned it), then you may actually have a problem with your novel. You've provided the structure of your answe...
