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Find people smarter than you to help you. As an example, Susan Elia MacNeal, the author of the Maggie Hope mysteries, didn't know anything about code-breaking when she started writing books about ...
"Is it okay..." and "Can I..." are subjective. It's about context. Are the sentences grammatically correct? Strictly speaking, no. But you are clearly writing in a first-person, casual, stream-of-...
Whether such a threshold exists or not is irrelevant, since you can never know whether you have met it or not. If you detected an error, you would fix it, so the number of known errors is always z...
I had a friend who was a substitute elementary teacher who had a similar problem. Granted, he was working with a fourth-grader, but essentially, he sat down with her and line by line they created t...
I cheated once: I pulled a book off my shelf and recreated it (in InDesign, but you might be able to do it in Word). Page size, margins (I used a ruler), font, type size, everything. Once I recreat...
A villain you want to take down is, at his/her core, someone who does not care about the suffering of others. An evil wizard who wants to murder every witch or wizard who isn't a "pureblood," reg...
While I am not a lawyer, if you purchase a physical CD (bit of a rarity these days, I know) and look at the booklet which has the liner notes, you should see copyright notices for each song. If lyr...
I found that when I was reading a collection of Grimm's fairytales — just translated, not the bowdlerized Disney versions — a whole bunch of them have nameless characters. The King, The Queen, The ...
What you need to do is show your introvert to the reader when no other characters are looking, or when he's with people he's close to in some sense. Does your introvert cry when he goes home from...
While I don't work in the TV industry, as I understand it, most shows have their own stable of writers and generally don't accept unsolicited manuscripts. (Some of the Star Trek shows did, but I ga...
No, it would not be appropriate. It's quite possible that nobody would check you up on this, but quote attributions are expected to be, you know, correct. Mis-attributing a quote might be an hones...
If it distracts from your plot and from your theme, then yes - sooner or later, that dialogue should be rewritten or cut entirely. Real conversations get sidetracked; they go off on tangents. If ...
I find these answers interesting because to me, a diary is a place you confess your innermost thoughts, while a journal is something you write in every day to talk about what you did. (note the jou...
Rather than focusing on generating names - a process that's usually somewhat arbitrary - perhaps examine the purpose of these names in your story. There's a school of thought that goes like this: ...
Unless you are near (what you think is) the end of your life, you don't have enough data yet to know what will ultimately be the best organization. So don't try to create an outline; just start wr...
That's how I'd do it. I'd capitalize it even if I were referring to someone else's book: For those who are new to programming, I strongly suggest reading through Chapters 3 and 4. For those wh...
Asimov did it with Nightfall as well as Standback's examples. As I've said elsewhere, it's only a "bad idea" if you're padding your story with effluvia. If you think you have more to say, more th...
Actually I find the repeated structure interesting. Clearly something is going on, some kind of external magical force which is creating changes in the "real world." My only advice would be not t...
I'd call it "Reference" or "Subject."
I'm willing to bet Scrivener can handle a lot of what you're looking for. I will cheerfully admit I haven't even read the documentation (I'm a Mac user... we don'need no steenken manuals) so it's g...
Sketch out your entire timeline before you write your story. Have an idea of what happened before and after. Your book takes place in medias res, in the middle of things. If you decide what your en...
Write an outline. At the very least write a sketch. So you are writing your story before you write your story. Have an idea of where it starts, what happens, and how it ends. This gives you someth...
Option 1: I'm Back! For an IF game, probably the easiest way to allow character death is to allow some kind of backup, or a chance to be restored to life. Examples include: Cloning Technology - ...
Set up your world as a version of The Matrix. When the player-character dies, s/he is removed from "the game," and can now only influence other players second-hand: mysterious text messages, alteri...
It's not particularly dark. There's so much unknown that we don't even know if we're supposed to worry. A strip club which is so old it feels like it's populated with antiques isn't particularly ...
