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It's a Your Mileage May Vary situation, but I think there are two good rules of thumb: 1) Explain only as much as you need for the story to make sense. This will vary depending on your audience, b...
In addition to what Chris Sunami said, I would point out that a scene is a lens, not a window. A great scene works by focusing your attention on just one thing. You can have many different things g...
Most stories are not psychological studies, and even those that are are not necessarily accurate. Indeed, many story characters undergo far more trauma than most ordinary people could ever psycholo...
My only objection to It Just Happens is when you overload the suspension of disbelief. You can draw on the power of the ancients for magic? great. You can draw on said power for flight, telekine...
The audience that actually cares about worldbuilding is pretty small. Most people who read LOTR, for example, don't care a fig about the whole legendarium. They only care about the story. Most st...
The basic shape of any character's story arc is that they want something and there are forces that make it difficult for them to get it. They try the least expensive thing they can to achieve their...
Don't focus on vocabulary. It is very hard to change your vocabulary and the only real and natural way to do it is by extensive reading. Any attempt to artificially liven up your prose with exotic ...
Every character had an arc. This does not mean that every character has their own subplot in your novel. But it means that they are driven in the same way that your hero is driven: they want someth...
The exact details don't matter, these are just guidelines. I looked at a few discusions from the CreateSpace community. The most helpful one is this one. You can see the different recommended in...
I really doubt that you can. Literature rests fundamentally on the sympathetic observation of human life. Whether you are writing literature or pulp, your success depends on creating convincing cha...
Sorry, there is no magical app or button or program which will fix your grammar. If you want to learn how to write better, in any language, the only solution is to practice, have your mistakes corr...
In person would be great if you can find a class, or a person willing to help you. Do not neglect to consider auditing a class. This is much cheaper than enrolling. A community college Writing C...
I think right now some publishers are looking for diversity, especially small presses. Li Ang Chang might get a little farther than Susan Brown, and probably quite a bit farther than Joe Brown. I...
I think you should make a very clear distinction between tragedy and futility. Classically literature has recognized both tragedy and comedy as essentially heroic forms. In a tragedy, the hero stri...
Please distinguish between writing for yourself (e.g. a journal) and writing for readers. If you want to writ for readers, then imagine your target readers as you write, and communicate something ...
Not only possible, but better. Publishers want to know that there is a market for your work. The success of your blog posts proves that there is. But there is a catch. Under what contract did you...
What rhymes? None stand out in that piece. Prose is full of words that rhyme with each other, but you only notice when they occur in the same rhythmic position, as they do in poetry. It takes rhyth...
Are rhymes bad in prose? Sometimes yes, it depends on the prose and the rhyme and how it's used. Poetic devices like rhyming and alliteration can be used in prose but it's not at all easy to do w...
All slang is culturally specific. The meaning of most of it can be figured out by context though. Certainly "temping" falls into that category. But vocabulary recognition simply does not happen o...
For non-fiction, publishers basically want two things. They want you to prove that you are qualified to write the book, and they want you to have a platform -- a bunch of people who already follow ...
Google Docs is an extremely helpful tool for Beta reading, and is used by several writers of my acquaintance. It allows commenting on individual selections of text, so it's easy to comment on a p...
I do think it is more difficult to find a critique group for non-fiction. All fiction has a common core: an interest in story. You can still usefully critique a piece that is outside of the genre's...
If you read with attention you will realize that there is very little of this in fiction. Actors can display all kinds of things with facial expression, which is why a script has to leave the actor...
It all depends on the contract. (Bear in mind that I'm not a lawyer. This is my amateur understanding of U.S. copyright law.) If the client was foolish enough to purchase the text from the writer...
What you are doing is called being original. It's not frowned upon; it's something most every writer strives for, especially with fantasy. The real challenge comes with making it believable. There ...
