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You haven't mentioned the style guide you're following; different guides have different rules. For Turabian / Chicago Style, the rules applicable are: A single-author entry precedes a multia...
Yes, you can absolutely use quotes to indicate sarcasm (or irony). If the sarcasm is in dialogue, you can write it exactly as in Hobbes's example. If you want to have the additional stage business...
Change something else in the sentence. A fighter is someone who fights for the pleasure of spectators, against his or her own safety. A fighter is someone who fights for the pleas...
Book titles are usually placed within quotes or italicized, in order to set them apart. Which one you use is a matter of style. Assuming that your publisher has no style preference (some do), you...
I think italics would be perfect. It makes total sense that the protagonist is recalling what someone else said — it's sort of an in-line flashback. Otherwise, how are you going to indicate that it...
I'm of the same mind as SF. Is the protagonist the killer or the good guys? If it's a crime novel, tone down the blood spatter and have more in the precinct. Lengthen the scenes where the detecti...
I agree with SF and Lauren that who your POV character is affects this. But I'll take a different approach in answering this: when you talk about your project socially (e.g. with friends/family), ...
If you want examples of successful diplomacy, try CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series, which I think is up to 15 books so far. The main character, Bren, is a diplomat between humans and the non-human spe...
What you need is a tell. Give Nicene some clear, identifying characteristic. She has purple hair; she doesn't let anybody touch her; she refers to any sort of weapon as a "thingamabob"; whatever. ...
Many of the original Grimm and Andersen fairytales had tragic elements in their endings. The Little Mermaid got legs, but every step felt like walking on broken glass, and she doesn't win the princ...
I'd lay out the existing journeys in some kind of grid (Excel might actually work for this) and see what commonalities there are, or if some kind of theme appears. Make a list of what defines a G...
Honestly, I can't tell if the narrator is supposed to be male or female, but I do kind of get the feeling that the author is probably male — especially if the narrator is supposed to be female. (A...
You're letting the perfect become the enemy of the good. You know it's a critical scene, and you're scared to screw it up. That's reasonable. The problem is that you're so scared of screwing it u...
If you're going to set something in a familiar city, I want all the details to prove you know it. I want it to be like when we watch Elementary or Person of Interest and we're constantly pausing to...
A comic -- web or paper, cartoon strip or sophisticated graphic novel -- is a different medium from conventional written stories. The biggest difference is that it's hard to do exposition; those l...
For what you need to do legally, you'll need to consult a lawyer in your jurisdiction. Laws vary. The rest of this answer is about practical considerations. First, are you on good terms with the...
I think you're confusing motives and details. You mentioned people from 500 years ago being very different from us. What concerns do we share over the centuries? Survival basics: food, shelter,...
Have you tried Scrivener? I haven't used it for screenwriting, but it looks like it's got a great tool for it. It's not open source, but $45 is fairly cheap.
It will ultimately depend on the quality of the writing, but no, I have no problem with authors crossing genres. JK Rowling wrote a crime novel and... whatever the hell The Casual Vacancy was suppo...
I'd be fine with all caps here. It's emphatic in a different way than italics. To me I hear the volume and force behind the word, not just the intensity. Compare: His breathing quickened. "Da...
Text in all capitals is harder to read than text in mixed case: A 1955 study by Miles Tinker showed that “all-capital text retarded speed of reading from 9.5 to 19.0 per cent for the 5 and 10-m...
Looking at the ethics code posted in the comments by @MarkBaker which can be found here you can see that there is no clear indication about your specific case. Especially because we can't possibly ...
If you are following the daily wordcount rules, NaNoWriMo is explicitly not about quality. It's about committing to getting stuff on paper so you can work with it. So many of us start a novel and ...
Sci Fi and Fantasy are perhaps the genres least concerned with character. Worldbuilding (so called) is often the central obsession of authors in those genres. (Historical can just the same sometime...
Fiction is based on observation, not invention. The same stories are told over and over again because the same stories are lived over and over again. If new writers repeat the stories of old writer...
