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Tell more stories. If you've built a world, put sentient beings in it and put conflicts in front of them. Let the world unfold in front of your characters, and let the characters talk about the o...
First of all, your protagonist almost must change, or there's not much point to your book. If s/he does not at some point stop running and pull him/herself together, your reader will feel like the ...
I'd say yes if you're careful about it and don't overdo it. Different formatting can be useful in quickly alerting the reader that the text is from an article or an email, particularly if it begins...
The word 'but' follows the same rules as any other conjunction, just like 'and' or 'or'. It's a word that joins two phrases. All of your examples are correct. The first phrase ends with a comma, ...
It is not grammatically correct, no. To be grammatically correct, you would use: "Why are you laughing?" However, if your hero speaks a certain way and it would be natural for him to ask the ques...
Some style guides consider contractions to be informal, and therefore would not be used in certain contexts. Beyond that, there's no grammatical restraint, either on they are vs. they're or the r...
I'm not going to tell you how to solve your problem. Quite frankly, I don't know how to solve your problem, despite having faced it countless times myself in the past. Instead, I'm going to show yo...
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...
