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I'd call that development. It covers everything in Dale's excellent list and dmm's couch time.
1) I would only capitalize the name if the restaurant considers it the proper name of the dish. So Denny's (a diner-type restaurant chain) at one point served an item called Moons Over My Hammy (...
You identify two problems in your question. One is "how can I effectively develop topics out of thin air without research, or spending hours before actually writing?" This is a "what to write abou...
Word doesn't recognize the difference between tick marks and smart apostrophes in the Find/Replace dialog. Just type the apostrophe character in both fields. As long as the preferences in your docu...
Your particular issue is that this is a rhetorical question. A real question is "Where is she?" or "How do I defuse the bomb?" You can use italics, caps, and maybe bold, depending on what else yo...
If you are one of those rare people who can write, straight through, without any major refactorings or changes of direction along the way, more power to you. But for many people, and IMO any long-...
(This is better now that it's been edited...) It may sound odd, but I think the main criterion is how the story treats death. If death is one possible threat among many (being captured, being tor...
A genre is a promise from the publisher to the reader about the kind of experience that the book will give them. The definitions of genres therefore are not technical, they are emotional. A couple ...
You really can't separate credibility from reach. Credibility is reach. Credibility gets a message attention. Credibility gets a message passed on. A traditional publisher is not the only source of...
Allow me to introduce you to Scrivener. Scrivener is a word processor which allows you to create unlimited documents within a single project, and see all your documents in a nice document tree in...
I don't know any one word that encompasses both. But if a narrative is not chronological, it's anachronic, and if it follows multiple characters, it's heterodiegetic. So maybe heterodiegetic anac...
This depends in part on how recognizable the landmark is to readers. On the one hand, if your scene is set in Times Square, it's hard to change anything -- enough people know the place that if you...
Beyond John Smithers's excellent answer... If you don't have the proverbial thorn for Androcles to remove from the lion's paw, you can choose something which is symbolic in general, so people imme...
As we've seen on earth, communities count time in reference to key events -- the creation of the world, the birth of a new religious figure, the beginning of a king's reign (these ones have less st...
There's no reason why it couldn't work, as long as you quickly make clear that it's internal dialogue. If it's a first-person narrative, the entire story is "internal dialogue," in a sense. The ma...
Both phrasings refer to an action that occurred in the past (his going). The additional nuance you need to consider here is whether the question itself sounds like it occurred in the past. A ques...
I love Scrivener for this kind of thing. You can put each thought onto an individual page, and then drag them around as you see fit. It even has a virtual corkboard screen so you can see many indiv...
I think if she's a major secondary character, you should try a draft where you go big with the weirdness without trying to explain her or "civilize" her. Make her weird. Embrace her weirdness witho...
I would only use the gendered pronoun if you know the gender of the animal in question. Lions have manes; lionesses don't. A calico or tortiseshell housecat is 99% guaranteed to be female, while an...
If "the humble, virtuous identity is not less or more authentic than the grandiose, power-grabbing one that replaces it," then both those (apparently contradictory) sets of characteristics exist in...
Your terminology is fine, and I think either way might work depending on your story. The idea that we're left wondering if a character is alive may be quite deliberate on the author's part. Wheth...
A classic take on this from the Bard is Much Ado About Nothing (I also recommend this wonderful filmed version, which stays fairly close to the text). Beatrice and Benedick both swear they will nev...
As long as you label the chapters with the name of the POV character, you're fine. George RR Martin famously has like a dozen POV characters per 700-page book. At least one that I remember had to t...
Label the chapters with the character names. George RR Martin does this at the top of every chapter of his monolith books, since he easily has a dozen POV narrators per book. No muss, no fuss, crys...
At the heart of all art is vision. The artist is an artist because the see something and find a way to express what they have seen so that others can share in the experience. No work of art can suc...
