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You're 95% of the way there; you have good instincts for what's readable. • For your first example, I'd try to put as much of the logistics of translation into narration as I could manage. After ...
Don't name him in his own thoughts. (I'm going to add names here for ease of discussion.) You have: vengeance was his, Garth of the Bill clan. He was the Foremost of the Forsworn But he's no...
You don't have to know how it ends, but you do have to know how it begins. It begins with some pain, some longing, some need, some disturbance in the equanimity of life that forces some deep deviat...
Another really useful tool here is foreshadowing and buildup. This is your first defense against the feeling of "awww, he just made that up": make it clear that the elements surprising the reader ...
"Mom" and "mother" and the other variations are all common enough that alternating between them probably won't be disruptive. On the other hand, they are different, with nuances of formality and a...
There are a few related issues here, which are tightly intertwined: How big is my readership? A small readership usually mean comments are few and limited. There's nobody talking, and there's nob...
Most trilogies or series follow chronological order, but there's no requirement. Do whatever serves your story. As long as it's clear to your reader what's happening when in relation to other event...
My blog is still being read, and at about the same level it always was. But as blogs have become a popular form of content marketing, it is inevitable that fewer and fewer of them are being read....
This is a classic "cabbagehead character," who allows you to gradually unveil your worldbuilding as he leaves his isolation and goes out into the larger community. Nothing wrong with this at all....
This related answer may help you, but I'll expand more here: I think it was J. Michael Straczynski, writer of Bablyon 5, who wrote that one could sum up "conflict" in three questions: What does ...
The great difficulty here is that there are no absolutes. The same piece could be achingly poetic or achingly dull, depending on whether it's part of a literary drama or a high-octane adventure. T...
FSC 100% means that all the wood in the product comes from FSC-certified forests. FSC Recycled means all the wood or paper in the product comes from reclaimed material. FSC Mix means a...
men can identify and empathize with male as well as female protagonists, while women identify better with female protagonists (the claim being, they can certainly sympathize with male protagonis...
It probably depends on the protagonists. Are they themselves magic users? Or even magic researchers? Is there actually a separate magic research (like the science research system in our world), or ...
Sounds like you want to write a philosophical novel. Two examples that I can think of are Walker Percey's Lost in the Cosmos and Robert Persig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Both of t...
It is not difficult to think of fantasy novels that don't have big battles (Voyage of the Dawn Treader). The battles, the strange creatures, etc, are set dressing. Sci Fi and Fantasy are often lump...
Genre is a marketing tool. Publishers are marketers of books. That is why you seek out a publisher rather than publishing yourself -- because you want the services of someone who knows how to marke...
"Romance" vs. "fantasy" are significantly different genres. You can absolutely have romance in a fantasy and fantasy in a romance, and you can absolutely write a romantic story in a fantasy setting...
Because God does not have a story arc. If story is the conflict between desire and what stands in the way of the fulfilment of that desire, God cannot have a story arc because nothing can frustrate...
There are plenty of SFF stories which deal with deities. There's an entire Forgotten Realms (D&D) series about gods being forced to take mortal avatars and walk the earth. The Belgariad pentolo...
The pertinent question here is: what is it you're trying to show? In other words, you need to first understand what the focus and purpose of the planning scene is. Only then do you know what to sh...
I believe that many if not all of the small literary magazines are edited by volunteers. How those volunteers are selected I am not so sure, but I would begin by scouring their websites looking for...
Chapter titles which aren't used as orientation sort of delineate the story: Potions Class, The Quidditch Match, A Long-Expected Party, The Tower of Cirith Ungol. They are a distillation, not even ...
To be honest, I couldn't even follow it in the question. I wonder if you may just be trying too hard not to have a narrator. I realize everyone wants to do first person narration these days, but th...
Get everything out in the first draft. Let him ramble on all you like. Put the first draft aside for a month or so. Go back and re-read, and be absolutely ruthless in your culling when re-reading ...
