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No one is a rival. Lots of people have a rival. The distinction is crucial. Your protagonist's rival does not think of himself as a rival, and neither should you. He thinks of himself as having a r...
A rival, as opposed to a mere villain or antagonist, is someone who is competing with you for the thing, person, or goal you both want. The only place where Malfoy and Harry directly competed was i...
I would say you have to attribute the quotes, even if you don't have to cite them flat out. So your first mention would be something like: This scene was in fact shot in Seville, Spain rather ...
Since you're writing this for your exam, your teacher is the authority on how to handle this. I'd ask them. If they're not available, you'll need to make this decision on your own. In the absence o...
That's a pretty broad question, but they key thing about horror, or any other strong emotion, it that it is all in the build up. What creates the tension in a horror movie, for instance, is not the...
The thing about writing is that everything has to be accomplished with a single stream of words. A narrative can only ever be doing one thing at a time, in stark contrast to movies, where many thin...
I think Lauren's suggested reformulation may be a better way to express the phenomena. YA is a very popular genre today, and much of YA seems to be in the fantasy/sci fi realm. So there is a lot of...
We are in the business of storytelling, and it is the telling, not the story, that sets us apart. Storytellers tell the same basic stories over and over and over again. Boy meets girl, boy loses gi...
The amount of realism in your book is set up by you as the writer. It's up to the individual reader to decide if this is the reader's particular cup of tea. Some fantasy books are so stiff with cl...
Some people will only read books if they are gritty and realistic. Some people will only read books if they are about horses. Some people will only read books if they are about dragons. No book is ...
Honestly, if you have not yet the read the writer who makes you say, oh no, I will never ever be able to be that good, you are not ready to start writing. Despair has to be the starting point, beca...
No one can know the writer's reasons but themselves, but I would point out a couple of things: If the detective is the star of of the show, you want them in frame. When you see a scene from a cha...
I think that the hidden question here is, does writing require teachable skills. Of course writing requires skills. You have to be able to make marks on paper with a stick, etc. The real question s...
You have to make a distinction between good grammar and what we might call the grammar of the good. Or perhaps I should say between grammar and the grammar of the good. Grammar is the mechanics o...
First, you need to decide if you are looking for someone to fix your story, someone to fix your language, or someone to fix your typos. These are very different things requiring very different skil...
No. A story stands or falls on the completion of the story arc. POV is simply about camera angles. You choose the camera angle that best frames the part of the story you are telling at the moment. ...
Three words: Pride and Prejudice We could name many others, but P&P is by most reckonings, one of the finest novels ever written, and it is not about death. But it is easy to see why the que...
If you want to write sensitively and authentically about personal trauma, you have pretty much two choices: Endure it yourself. I don't recommend choosing to undergo this. Talk to other people wh...
If you don't have an idea for a story, you can retell an existing one. There are a few ways to do this. One is to take a song that tells a story (a lot of folk songs and ballads are small stories) ...
IANAL but, as an anthologist, you automatically own a copyright on the anthology -- not on the passages themselves, but on the particular collection and arrangement of those passages you have made....
It's not that it's not acceptable, it's that it is orthogonal. What editors care about is compelling stories in the current taste. There is nothing to say that cannot include scientific detail. Tha...
If you have so many pauses that you feel the need to vary how you describe them, chances are that the reason it feels repetitive is that you are reaching for the same device too many times, not tha...
First, that is not an onomatopoeia. A slap does not sound like the word slap. Second, this technique is ineffective either way. You can't turn up the volume in prose using caps and asterisks. Nor...
Either one is okay. The second one is more emphatic, and I would only put it on a new line if there was a whole speech (that is, not for one sentence). But there's nothing wrong with the punctuatio...
The nice thing about websites is that there can be more than one. Publishers, being publishers, want to promote their books, which will of course include on the web, but that doesn't mean you can'...
