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It's just scene-setting. Your main character gets up in the morning and goes out onto her balcony to enjoy the morning while her caffeine is brewing, and she contemplates all the plants in her gard...
Few realistic choices are that hard in themselves. What makes them hard is history. Does Spiderman save Mary Jane or a bus load of schoolkids? Easy, save the school kids. The needs of the many,...
The toughest dilemmas I have faced are the ones where I spin my wheels, going around and around because of doubt. So you have to set it up in such a way that there is no satisfactory choice. The ...
Alliteration is the repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of consecutive words. It is not limited to consonants, and there is nothing in the definition that speaks to its purpose ...
Conflict in a story arises from desire. The basic structure of any story is that the protagonist has a desire and there are forces or people who oppose their attaining that desire. The story procee...
1) Use the ellispses and emphasis, and tighten up the spaces. This man, this...monster...has done something despicable. There's no typesetting reason to have spaces on both sides of those el...
My answer is a variation on my answer to the question you linked to: In prose, you cannot act out dialogue. Prose is recieved by the reader asynchronously. Things that take minutes can sometimes be...
I wouldn't rewrite it if you don't have to. Perhaps you could start by reading your existing draft and making notes, perhaps in the form of an outline, as you go along. If you didn't leave yourse...
I think you're confusing being organized in persuasive or technical writing, where it's important to stick to the topic sentence, with creative writing. By the way, I wish you had given us a less ...
Pretend you are writing an email, and that the recipient will read it as plain text. "To put spacing between sections, hit 'enter' instead of using the space bar.... To highlight subheadings, use ...
Everything is boring unless it has a function in the story. It it is irrelevant, it is boring. There is nothing you can do with language to make irrelevant stuff not be boring. Conversely, if somet...
If you want to see conventions; look to action flicks like Die Hard or Taken (or dozens of others). There is your standard ticking bomb. There is the bad guy escaping -- Willis must find a way to...
There is another option, and that is to go ahead and describe, describe, describe. A beautifully written natural history book or article is a pleasure to read. Here is some inspiration to help yo...
Clothes Smell (cologne/perfume, the scents that may be in clothing or hair) Body language (swagger, creep, stroll, cringing, stride) Attitude (businesslike, flirtatious, bored, scared, tired) Voic...
To answer your question, I have to talk about the difference between a plot and a story. A plot is a sequence of events that happen. A story is an arc of rising tension leading to a resolution. (Th...
The reader is going to form an image of a character or a scene by putting together bits from their own experience. They do this based on the clues you give them, but they use those clues to select ...
As in many such cases, the answer is to do your research. Speak with people who are gay, and ask them the questions you need. "How did your understanding that you're gay form?" "Was there anything...
This is the sort of question you can best answer with a stroll down to your local bookstore. But consider: thrills come from danger. You need to be strapped in to ride the roller coaster. A book le...
English does not have an allergy to adverbs. Bad writing teachers sometimes tell their students not to use adverbs, perhaps because they are not skilled enough to teach them to use them well. Dif...
How does your fantasy race view humans? They don't like us. In their legends, we're stupid, brutish and disgusting - basically, "human" is their version of "troll". In this case, I'd recommend co...
Quite honestly, if you do not read widely and voraciously, you have no business trying to be a writer. To do otherwise would be like a chef who only ate once a week and only at McDonald's. It would...
How can you tell whether "yes, this is good" or "okay, this needs work"? These are objective artistic judgments. Emotional distance from the work is certainly part of what you need to make them ab...
Beyond time and cleansing your brain-palate, which others have noted here, I found that being a little "off" helps me, oddly enough. A little sleepy (like foregoing my morning coffee), a little hyp...
Well, consider the term cookie cutter. Now imagine that you love cookies and you want to go into the cookie business. Which do you think would be the best strategy: Bring out a totally original l...
Every story has a bootstrapping problem. You have to establish characters, a world (fantasy or not), a problem or desire, and the obstacles to that problem or desire, and the story cannot really ge...
