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The mainspring of story is desire. What drives your hero on from one scene to the next? What shapes their actions in a consistent way? It is their desire, they thing they are driven to attain. The ...
Essentially it means that they obey their own internal rules and logic. If it's established that dwarves live 200 years, there can't be one who is arbitrarily 500 years old. There has to be an expl...
I don't think there's a name for the technique aside from nonlinear storytelling or nonlinear narrative. A story is "nonlinear" when it's not told in the order in which events occur, but the for a ...
The passive voice is a grammatical tool, and like any tool it can be overused. However, passive voice does have legitimate uses; there are times it makes sense to use it. This is particularly the c...
You could try a relational database (like FileMaker, although that's not free), a mind map (I've never used one, so I don't know what features they have), or some kind of wiki. I use Scrivener with...
Once you've explained the process, you don't need to walk through the process again. You can have a few scenes which are set in whatever the setting is where the skill is practiced (computer lab, f...
Pack of Playing Cards? Some might associate this with Poker and Casinos, but it would receive a lot less heat than a pack of cigarettes I believe. Really though, all you need to do is think of th...
Is using colons and/or semicolons in dialogue awkward? No. Using them is fine. To me at least, every one of the above quotes looks perfectly natural. I agree that trying to find another way to writ...
Colons are fine because they represent a stop, the same as an m-dash. I would hesitate to use a semi-colon in dialogue because to me it's a bookish piece of punctuation. It gives the reader a visua...
"Brokeback Mountain" is a short story from Annie Proulx which became a major film. Sherlock Holmes appeared in 56 short stories, and has reportedly been played on TV more than any other single cha...
They are two different programs for two different tasks. Scrivener is for writing your text. InDesign is for laying out the completed text after it's written and edited. I have written fiction i...
Your goal with any tale of horror is to inspire just that in your readers: horror. In order for them to feel it though, the people they care about - the protagonist and main characters - must also ...
A longer post can work on a blog that usually tends toward shorter posts if you take some care in structuring it. "Here are 20,000 words, plus equations" may send some people to the "back" button ...
One of your characters could "write" the poem and recite it to another. You could present the poem as something in a book which a character reads, or establish that your character is a poet who is...
It's really good that you're looking for professional critique - that's a really helpful thing to have! However, a Kirkus book review might well be the wrong address. Kirkus Reviews A Kirkus rev...
Provided you mean that footnotes are only for translations (that is, you're not using footnotes for additional information or for source citations), I'd put the glossary of translations at the begi...
I'm working with a writer who's self-publishing, and she had to get a different ISBN for the hardcover, softcover, and eBook versions of her novel. I remember reading somewhere that if you issue a ...
Any text-based "markup" format -- LaTeX, HTML, various XML schemas like DocBook, etc -- will serve you better than binary formats like Word, Pages, FrameMaker, etc. (I am aware that some of these ...
The answer is for you to do what the universoty or your department requires. There is no universal answer to this. For academic writing in English, one would likely be using the APA Style Guide o...
There are three aspects to consider: The plot The characters The writing If you want to know if the project is worth pursuing at all, read the entire thing from scratch. Furthermore, read it an...
You'll want a copyeditor who specializes in academic writing, if possible one that specializes in journals. Please also note that, when the writer's first language isn't English, some journals re...
Let me see if I've got this right: You've got two characters who are telling you what to do (or what not to do). And you think that's a problem? Writing believable characters who want to write th...
Sounds right to me. The pitch is a letter which you write to the publisher, and since the book is about you, the pitch should be from your perspective. Today, those events happened in the past, but...
Two things immediately jump out at me: 1) Granted that this is a very short excerpt, there isn't enough info or setting for me to understand where the characters are, in time or in place (not lite...
So here's a question I'd like you to consider. You're trying to grip the reader. What, in this passage, do you expect/hope will manage to do that? I'm afraid I didn't find this opening to be very ...
