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The basic material for a close reading is the text itself. Literally, you read it closely, line by line. Is it clear what is being said? Are there allusions to things outside the text that may affe...
You'll find a lot of good answers here: How do you make a story succeed in spite of an unsympathetic main character? On top of that: If your character is a misanthrope out of disappointment, that...
Think of your objects first. Sit down and brainstorm a bunch of things. Things which can be hidden reasonably well in a school. Things which might have thematic links to your characters, things wh...
There are two kinds of density of text. It is common to find one author (e.g. Karl Marx) writing text that is dense in both senses, but let's tease the two types apart: One way of making text de...
I think it's the Snowflake Structure guy who plots out his books as "Three Disasters and an Ending." He likes a four-act structure rather than three (or five as on stage). So you have your initia...
You can create an average of any data set. If you average out enough story data than you can describe an average story arc and assign names to all of the moments in that arc. This exercise is not w...
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...
