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I believe this character can be redeemed, because I believe anyone can be redeemed. But I don't see you being able to do justice to that story as a sideplot. This character kills a family member ...
Monica's excellent answer provides you with the how, but I'd like to touch on when, since you asked "how soon is too soon?" The rough answer is "It's too soon if the villain hasn't earned it." Y...
Ways I've seen: The choose your own adventure option, where you give them a list of possibilities and tell them where they are. The Lord of The Rings option where you just sequence the endings an...
Write at least part of your second book before editing your first. I'm going to take a slightly different slant than most of the other contributors and suggest that you write about half of your se...
Having a villain lop off an arm or leg ought not offend someone who either was born without them or lost them due to accident or combat. Losing limbs is not desirable. I have some disabled friends...
The concept of power armour isn't in itself subject to a trademark or copyright, but Iron Man's definitely would be, just as a costume consisting of a bodysuit, boots, and a cape would be okay but ...
Hate is not just over-blown dislike. Hate is visceral, a wish that somebody else suffer harm, often for the harm they have actually done, in other cases for the harm the hater truly believes they h...
To me, hate has always been an intense desire for something to change, while believing it is resistant to that change. Good people can hate many things. They hate the villain. They hate their past...
All of the answers here already are good answers. It's a complex topic, and all three answers addresses key points the others miss or touch too lightly. But I feel there's a few important things th...
You do what the submission guidelines say you should do. ALWAYS find out what is wanted. Some publishers want a 50 page extract, some want it all. They often want their own standards for layou...
Simple--Metrics. Count the number of named characters and the number of acts/chapters they are in. Named characters should appear in at least two chapters, to reward the reader for learning them,...
Magic vs advanced technology is a common enough question in fiction that your readers will already be primed to wonder. I agree with Amadeus that the reference to "knobs" is, in and of itself, eno...
The fact that you use "knobs" that turn is enough, in my opinion. Another way would be to have a naturally scientific (logic based) mind actually fix an older artifact and get it working again. It...
Asking a good question is a lot harder than writing a good answer, even if writing a good answer likely requires more research and more experience, which makes them very valuable. So let's have a l...
Call her Marie. One way is to let a few other characters (Mike and John) express their frustration with Marie when she is not present; and actually laugh with each other by exaggerating and joking ...
You'll see a good example to learn from when protagonist Ralph meets Vanellope in Wreck-It Ralph. She annoys him partly because of a short-lived immature aping of his words, but mainly because she...
Unless you were given written permission to finish the MSS, leave it as it is. It was probably given to you to read, not rewrite. If you feel compelled to write it, use it to inspire your own wor...
People will draw parallels between racism in your world and actual racism, because both you and your readers live here and now. It's not just that it can't be helped, it's part of why we write. W...
The length of the chapter should be dependent on what you need to say. If you're writing a battle scene from the perspective of a character, then make it longer. However, you do not need every chap...
Chapters should reflect the sequence or flow you are looking for. Keep the reader interested enough to want to actually read the next chapter. Some books almost want you to "skip" a chapter.
A "dictionary" for your fantasy language should never be needed by the reader. If the reader has to learn a language, or flip back and forth to a dictionary, the flow of the reading is broken every...
Just because your character is a human-demon, it doesn't have to struggle. He might just be a human with an increased appetite for drinking blood, dismembering people or what ever else you consider...
Details and structure define the tone of how something is read, and names are a detail. Whether or not a character/prop should have a name will depend on how you want the story to feel to the read...
I think you may be overthinking the issue. In technical writing when you name three entities with elements of a specific subset, the ordering of the specific subset doesn't come into play unless ...
This will not help determine how many is too many character to name but to mitigate the downsides, I would look closely at the types of names being used. For example five female characters named Li...
