Search
I can plan all sorts of specific aspects in a novel such as characters, locations, and the plot in general, The short version of the below: Plan the first chapter, plan the first scene, and e...
Why not just put a blindfold on and walk around your house for a few hours? Take notes into a recorder or a voice note app about what you're feeling, thinking, smelling, hearing, about whether othe...
"Profit" is simply "bringing in more money than you spent to create/achieve X task." If you bake cookies, and the ingredients and stove fuel work out to cost you 15 cents a cookie and you sell th...
I could suggest the Water! trilogy by Gael Baudino, but it's not well-known and I found the experimental format exhausting. Still, Your Mileage May Vary. In the three books (O Greenest Branch, Th...
I believe this is part of the plot of the movie (spoiler below) Memento although I'm going on the Wikipedia summary, as I've never seen it. I've read at least one sci-fi short story (dystopi...
You have a few problems here. One is basic command of grammar. You have run-on sentences, weird dialogue attributes, and just outright incorrect sentence structure. You need a proofreader before an...
1) unusually smart, I presume by "smart" you are not saying the same thing as "clever", "insightful" or "thoughtful", which IMO leaves an academic understanding of how things work. You show this ...
I'm going to spin this around for you. In Jeffrey Schechter's My Story Can Beat Up Your Story, Schechter suggests that a lot of theme is about the protagonist asking a thematic question, e.g., ...
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 ...
The way you have it is fine. It's clear that each paragraph is a different speaker, even if the dialogue doesn't begin the paragraph. You may also want to browse other questions here under the dia...
In the context you've provided, OFF Marie, left stewing now means "this is the last thing the camera sees before it moves off her to the next shot." These are framing directions to the camera pers...
Your best bet is research. Find a "Little India" community, wander around, and listen. Sit at a corner coffeeshop for a few days. Walk through the retail area. Don't stalk people, but pay attention...
For internal documentation I've found wikis to be quite useful. A wiki has several useful features for this task: built-in change-tracking doc can be structured as several pages (e.g. one per ma...
When you have a question like that in narration, you are essentially narrating the protagonist's thoughts. If you put quotes around them, or italicized them, and made them present tense, they would...
Comma, dash, and brackets are not simply different degrees of parenthesis, they are different types of parenthesis. Comma parentheses denote modification or clarification of the main point. ...
TL;DR - Read. Learn. Write. Finish what you write. Never stop repeating the cycle. Reading Reading and writing is a cultural conversation. People write books to say something. Other people read ...
Get out of your own head. Write. Just write. Stop worrying about whether it's perfect. Stop worrying about which book to follow. You've got a list taller than the coffee table and they can contrad...
I think you're confusing "foreshadowing" with "prophesizing." Foreshadow is derived literally from "before" + "shadow" — the shadow of an event falls before the event itself. The "shadow" means the...
No, you can only do that if you're making some sort of break or shift in narrative style. If the story switches to a dream, for instance, or if the characters enter a Fae realm or another universe ...
As others have said, show, don't tell. Because that advice is rather vague, however, allow me to explain. The way I understand 'show, don't tell' is 'let the reader form his own conclusions. Just m...
This is a job for Scrivener! :) Scrivener is an incredibly flexible writing program. It allows you to sort your thoughts into multiple documents within a project, see two documents at once, create...
There is an element the other answers do not address. Jaime has a reputation as being a great swordsman. We are shown, not told, that he has this reputation. A character's reputation is as much an ...
Let's call your characters Dave (the intuitive tactician) and Kate (the analytic) so we have some way to refer to them. Kate can be so analytical, so dependent on data, that she feels like she can...
of course debuts can do well if they're good. Some of it will also depend on marketing and genre, but there's nothing stopping a first novel from being a smash.
As long as you very clearly indicate the date at the beginning of each chapter, so the reader isn't lost, sure, go for it.
