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Your goal, as the author, is for the characters to bond over the journey. But what is your reader reading for? Your reader doesn't know that the characters are meant to bond by the journey's end....
There are different ways to format written text. Examples include: Quotes: A warning etched under the sign read “Electromagnetics strictly prohibited.” Italics: A warning etched under t...
Avoid killing/raping/otherwise injuring the love interest (particularly a female love interest) just to create manpain in your anti-hero. Avoid making the love interest a plot device with no othe...
What you need to do is define the relationship between the subplot and the primary plot. In other words, you need to know what role the romance subplot is playing in your story. Almost any relatio...
So if you were asked to build a wooden house, would you take that to mean that you could not use glass for the windows of fiberglass for the shingles or nails to fasten all the pieces together? We...
An infodump is when the author has to get a whole bunch of important information to the reader, but it's not integral to the plot at that moment. If Character 2 is ranting and finally getting some...
You can certainly look at it from the market perspective. What one editor rejects another may accept. What 100 editors reject, the 101st editor may accept. But you can also look at it from the per...
There are several techniques for doing this, as Lauren Ipsum illustrates, but consider that the first person narrator is also a character and how they narrate the story is part of how their charact...
Your narrator compares herself to others. I met Sandy at the coffee shop. I towered over her by a full head. Cheap and simple: Your narrator looks at himself in a mirror. In the bathroom,...
The basic block of conflict is "Person or Group A wants something, and Person or Group B wants to stop that." The intrigue and originality are all in the details. Create intriguing characters and g...
There are only a few basic storylines. Some say there are only seven basic plots in all fiction. What differentiates different works is the telling. If the telling of your work reminds people too s...
First of all: you can HypnoThyroidWriter.com has an article specifically for this called Journal creation — a marriage of Canva & CreateSpace templates for Word. Apparently the author of that ...
Personally, I'd think a few clichés to avoid are: 1) The villain does something stupid so the protagonist has no choice but to kill him, in self-defense of defense of an innocent. This relieves th...
Company and brand names are not set off in italics, period. It's irrelevant whether the name is real or fictional. The kinds of names/titles which do take italics: Publications (newspapers, mag...
While ethically correct, giving credit and creating links to other sites would be antithetical to the aims of a content marketing blog, which is to attract potential customers to a site and to demo...
I think doing your own research and making your own observations is perfectly legitimate. You can also get a bunch of friends over and have everyone listen to the same video/audio recordings and ...
I don't think in medias res should necessarily be understood as jumping into the middle of the story. I think we should look at it more as a story is embedded in a history. You may need to understa...
It rather sounds like what you are writing is not a platonic relationship but a frustrated romantic relationship. There are, of course, millions of stories of frustrated romantic relationships. And...
If George R.R. Martin can have something like 47 POV characters per book, including one who is only in the prologue and then gets killed by a crow dropping a statue of a lion eating a dragon on his...
All these analytical schemas are interesting, but I don't think you can rely on them for building a story. It is like dissecting a body. An autopsy may tell you what killed them, but it won't bring...
Put it in a drawer for a month or three. Pull it out, re-read it, mark up problems, and fix them. Then hand it off to an editor. Implement those edits. Lather, rinse, repeat as necessary. At that ...
Readers are not hooked by outlandish openings. Readers are hooked by character, story, and setting. You can introduce a character, story, or setting in an outlandish way. (See Steinbeck's introduct...
I can think of several instances of bad foreshadowing, where I have moved from thinking the character might die, to knowing beyond any doubt that he will die. Let's examine them first: In Farscape...
It's important to the character development that he is isolated for an extended period of time, antagonized by others and also made to feel powerless. If your character is stuck in one spot, a...
Depending on the tone of your book, you can make that work for you by making subsequent text sarcastic, funny, meta, or the intro to a flashback. I had destroyed the earth. Okay, it was just a ...
