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Your character can be boring, but your story shouldn't be. Here's the golden ideal: every line of prose and every line of dialogue should serve a purpose. If somebody is saying a lot of boring stu...
Heed Coleridge's admonition to Wordsworth: "it is impossible to imitate truly a dull and garrulous discourse, without repeating the effects of dullness and garrulity." So this may be one of those t...
Your description has to be about the setup — the 5% that isn't about the discovery. Or maybe the first 10%, after the initial discovery which gets your protagonist over the threshold of the adventu...
Millions of people bought tickets to see Titanic even though they knew in a advance that the ship sinks. They went back to see it again and again even though after the first time they knew exactly ...
There were various methods for estimating words from the number of pages in a typed manuscript, since typewriters don't count words, but tend to have very consistent fonts and spacing. All modern w...
If you're on a Mac, you can't use yWriter. :) Beyond that, from the screenshots it looks like yWriter only allows you to break into chapters, while Scrivener lets you have files in folders with no ...
If you're "reproducing" a newspaper article in your book, write it exactly as you would an actual newspaper article. That makes it look real, and helps keep the suspension of disbelief for your rea...
I would suggest looking for professional editors associations in your country. Here in Canada, for example, we have the Editors Association of Canada. Such associations will likely have referral se...
You tell it. Show vs tell has become a monster that is twisting fiction out of any recognizable shape. While it is often good advice for particular passages, telling is a fundamental part of the no...
My beloved Scrivener does the job beautifully. Paste your text in and then go under Project —> Text Statistics and it gives you the list you're looking for. Other people on this board have rec...
Depends. Do you want a happy ending, or a downer? Do you want to explore the idea that "winning" or "achieving the goal" can come at too high a price? Will your protagonist realize that it doesn...
If you want to maximize the success of your book, seek professional publication. Being successful with self publishing is like being successful playing the lottery. Even those who win small prizes ...
If it's a report generated by your company, you may as well put the logo on it. The only reason not to is if it's literally an internal memo, like an email or something, which isn't really being "d...
The first thing that determines how a character acts in a story is not their personality, but their motivation. In short, what do they want. If your characters all want the same thing, they will t...
I think it's author preference. Either of these would be okay: “Where do you want these?” Jon’s publisher asked, bobbling a box with the word “books” scrawled across the side. “Where do yo...
Write your Silmarillion instead. Tolkien created his Elvish languages because he was a professor of linguistics. He created the world of LOTR to have someone to speak his languages. The Silmaril...
Design is the stage. Story is the play. Story is built around desire and the frustration of desire. The stage exists as a place for that desire to be born, to be frustrated, and to be ultimately ac...
The best possible sources are the writers you admire. The best possible way to improve as a writer is to read with attention. Good writers read differently, constantly paying attention to the techn...
Stories are made up of incidents. Each incident is a distinct unit of storytelling. Incidents lead the protagonist closer to or further from their goal. Each incident has a structure of its own, it...
I think this is very much a matter of the overall narrative style of the work. Some narrative styles will give you great liberty to do this, some will make it very difficult or forced. The question...
While it might not be "professional," there are about eleventy gazillion words of meta-analysis (shortened to just meta) of the BBC's Sherlock, easily accessible on Tumblr by looking for the approp...
To me, the phrase Show don't Tell can have only one clear meaning, and it comes down to what it means to show. Show means to describe what the reader would see for themselves if they were present i...
I agree you must tell some things; but I think you can embed those tellings in a "showing": Anna shifted the sword on her back for the tenth time since morning, the strap refused to rest in that...
The starting point here has to be to ask yourself whether you are writing a novel or a polemic. If your story is just an excuse to make an argument against some form of discrimination, then you are...
Most writing contests have a fee to enter because they need the fees to pay for the prizes. In fact, a lot of small magazines need fees from their writing contests just to stay in business. A few ...
