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What Query Shark Says Let's take a look at what precisely QS has written there: This is a log line. Avoid them. Think about it: it [refers to: they must decide whether to resign their liv...
While I'm usually fanatic about number agreement (like not using "they" as a gender-netural third-person-singular pronoun in English), Example #1 actually doesn't bother me. I think it's because I'...
Books compiling previously-published articles are not new. The usual challenges there are selecting and organizing your material and editing it for a different audience. Compiling material that i...
The way a character thinks of a ship tells a lot about the relationship between the character and the ship. For example: Someone who thinks of the ship as an inanimate tool will naturally tend to...
Here are a few principles I think can help you in your present difficulty: Research is great as long as it isn't blocking you from writing. Assume your first draft and your final draft are going ...
I would suggest that the key question you should be asking yourself is whether you actually have a story to tell. The heart of any story is a decision. The protagonist (and possibly other character...
It is better to be a straightforward as possible in all descriptions. The aim is to form an image in the reader's mind, and the simplest language that does that is the language you should choose, s...
This has been handled a few ways in comics: Have the text in word balloons be a translation of the original, with a footnote indicating "translated from other-language-name". You can graphically...
This is how it was handled in the Asterix comics. Specifically Asterix and the Goths:
You can create a character that is a fraud, and seems to have inherent weaknesses, but once in a while they act out of character and against their supposed weakness, in some situation that is criti...
There is probably nothing you can do that will get publications like the Economist to review a self published book. Major outlets like this are bombarded with more book review requests than they co...
The letter is a primary source, as you already know. This is the actual artifact, the letter the young woman received from NASA. The article about the history of these events is a secondary sourc...
Well, if you garner enough attention to get any critics interested in savaging you, you will already be doing well. But critics qua critics are unlikely to savage you for it unless you do it clumsi...
You have two choices that I can see, and which one you use will likely be dependent on the amount of foreign-language copy you have versus the amount of space you have in the panel to display it: ...
Story is driven by desire and that which stands in the way of achieving desire. If your character had a strong desire, she would have a goal. If she does not have a strong desire, that means she ha...
and welcome to Writers. As has been pointed out, this is likely a duplicate, but I will offer my opinion. A lot of writing is done via writer preference. This means it's up to you what works and ...
I suspect that you don't really want to describe their emotions in the clinical sense. Rather, you want the reader to know how they feel, and to feel how they feel, or at least to feel sympathy for...
You should follow normal paragraph rules, which are, essentially, that a paragraph contains a complete thought. Of course, this is a fuzzy definition. What makes a thought complete? A sentence, a c...
So, does the attempt to not italicize for native speakers make sense? Would having it not italicized for native points of view but italicized for non-native be reasonable? I think this is a go...
It strikes me that this difficulty in deciding how to format all of these languages is just a canary in the coal mine keeling over to let you know that this is all going to be too confusing for the...
As you rightly perceive, the moments that have a potential for gut emotional appeal are well known, but merely creating the moment does not always produce the emotion -- precisely because we all kn...
Arguments modify the behavior of a program. Running it without arguments means you get is default, unmodified behavior. So the help should describe the default unmodified behavior first, in the bod...
Good stories are not created by withholding information from the reader. They are created by constructing a satisfactory story arc, by creating the desire to know what happens next. The desire to k...
If this were a conventional commercial publisher that was in position to distribute the books widely it would be a very good deal. If it is a purely speculative venture by someone with no previous ...
Artistically, each book should be as long as it needs to be. Commercially, there are certain limits determined by salability and risk. A thin book may not be perceived by the reader as value for m...
