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I would say the "Black Moment" is anywhere from the 50% to 75% mark in the story. I would prefer "Darkest Hour", and instead of "Point of Death" the "Last Chance". The Darkest Hour is when the MC ...
There is nothing wrong with serendipity in a story. Our lives are like that anyway, governed largely by chance. What matters in a story is the moral arc of the characters. What chance occurrences s...
two thoughts: 1) You don't need the while X then Y structure to convey parallel events. Just list them one after another. It's implied that they're simultaneous. 2) Separate your X and Y (the chi...
This questions is unanswerable except in regard to a specific market. We live in an age of taking offence, and also in an age of giving offence. Certain things will close doors to certain segment...
I think it's easier to cut than to add. Therefore, since you seem to be very good at outlining and sticking to your outline (yay!), perhaps you would benefit from adding more branches to your tree...
IANAL, but, you own all the rights to work you create. No one else acquires any rights to that work unless you grant it to them through an explicit agreement. By sending them your articles to publi...
Release them as Plot Bunnies! NaNoWriMo has forums for "adopting out" plot bunnies -- see https://www.wikiwrimo.org/wiki/Plot_bunny for more info. Or just create a blog post where you list thes...
In that period, education was not the province of the nobility but of the church. A intelligent and idealistic young man or woman would have a very obvious outlet for their intelligence and idealis...
Organize your copy into thoughts. Break when you have a new one. Paragraphs separate lengthy copy into smaller conceptual chunks. Each paragraph is supposed to be a new thought, more or less. Whe...
If someone asked me to proofread in return for a percentage, I'd turn them down, because I'd want to be paid as soon as the work is done, and I wouldn't want how much I get paid to be dependent on ...
There is nothing wrong with a long sentence, but it should still be a sentence. Long sentences generally result from qualification and elaboration of a single point. But that is not what is happeni...
IANAL, but questions of this sort fall under the doctrine of fair use, which may differ from one jurisdiction to another. Generally, fair use says that there are certain exceptions to the protectio...
"I want to hook the reader by displaying the danger and darkness of my world" This is a very common idea about how to engage the reader, but it has a fundamental flaw: Darkness and danger are not ...
I suspect you may be miscalculating where your story begins. A story arc whose climax has a massive impact on a relationship generally begins with the beginning of that relationship, with all the t...
That approach is fine for a landing page. But what you have to bear in mind is that people don't use landing pages. This is true across all categories of information. There has been a steady declin...
I think the closes you are going to come is "narrative irony" or "dramatic irony", but that does not name narrator specifically. I can't think of any case of transmuting this into "Ironic narrator"...
If the figure were in another published work, you would cite it the same way you would if it were somebody else's work. Citing yourself is done when applicable; that's not an error. You indicated...
I am in favor of rules and coherence. However, also remember that you do not have to show all your work. Just because you as the writer/creator know how magic/powers work doesn't mean you have to ...
An annotated edition of a work is essentially a book within a book. The inner book is the original text and the outer book is the volume of annotations. Cite the book you are citing, inner if you a...
In addition to Lauren's excellent points, I would refer you to this question: "The flux capacitor--it's what makes time travel possible." When to keep world-building explanations short. Whether you...
There are examples of separate stories connected thematically. I think the question is, when is such a work a collection of independent stories on the same theme and when is it a single novel. One...
It has become fashionable in recent years to base the appeal of a novel on personal identification with the protagonist. That is, enjoyment of the novel is supposed to consist in a personal aspirat...
This is generally inadvisable (which is not to say that it is not done sometimes). The reason it is inadvisable is that every artform has its palette, its set of devices and conventions by which it...
I never use flashback, I always use a frame, so obviously I think that works better. There are several ways to use a frame; as a report to a superior, a story to a friend or lover, explaining some...
If your books are not standalone, a "previously on..." intro is probably a good idea. You want just enough information to orient the reader without spoiling or rehashing the previous book(s). Al...
