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You're letting the perfect become the enemy of the good. Let's be blunt: your initial efforts will suck. That's because every writer's initial efforts suck. Stephen King? Sucked. JK Rowling? Sucke...
I might italicize them the first time, in narration, to emphasize that they are neologisms, and then have a definition immediately afterwards. Once you've defined the term, though, you don't have t...
If your animals are anthropomorphized, you can come pretty close to describing human-level expressions, depending on the animal in question. If your animals are not sentient, you have to study the...
The publisher essentially wants to know two things about you. Can you tell a good story. Can you behave professionally and deliver on your commitments. Omitting the summary obviously reflects ...
I would be careful. Yes, there is much to be said for learning a complex skill by practicing in parts. But there is a real and pervasive danger of getting caught up in language when you should be f...
Longform storytelling (which is what a novel or novella is) is very very difficult. It is also only tangentially related to writing. You can be good at writing and know nothing about longform story...
"moreover" and "in addition to" are the kind of connectors that occur to us when we think of another idea as we are writing. It often happens that as you are writing one idea in support of a point,...
I think it's a great exercise to strengthen your writing skills. You can focus on one thing to improve — descriptions, or characterization, or pacing, or sentence structure — and just focus on that...
Everyone has their pet phrases and turns of phrase. That in itself does not matter much. What matters is whether you are expressing repetitive or monotonous ideas. Yes, you can go in and insert s...
I would not have thought S&W was long enough to be tedious, but it is certainly dry. A considerably more lively, and longer, and, I think, better book is Sir Ernest Gowers The Complete Plain Wo...
This is an example of direct quoted thought, which is a construct that only occurs in fiction. (Actually, direct quoted putative thought, but that is beside the point.) I do seem to recall seeing...
It is not so much about the work being ready for critique as about the writer not being able to make it any better without an outside critique. So, a beginning writer, or a poor reader, who can n...
Well, someone wrote a book without using the letter E, so by default the wasn't used. (according to Wiki, it does slip in three times. Very hard to avoid. Plus technically it's on the cover.) Wheth...
Fantasy and science fiction books have a major additional task that other genres can avoid if they wish: worldbuilding. A story of any genre can devote a lot of attention to description and detail...
You almost certainly can. At very least, if this is a project that appeals to you, then you can try, and see how it goes. There have been stories and novels written in second-person future tense, ...
The sentence that gets away from you is almost always the result of starting in the wrong place. Look at the first clause in your sentence. Everything that follows has to align with that clause, bo...
Here's an example to consider: Peter was most dreadfully frightened; he rushed all over the garden, for he had forgotten the way back to the gate. Now you may be thinking that this example ...
In theory, @LaurenIpsum's answer makes perfect sense. However, is we look at the market, we see this is not how things are done in practice. For example, J.K. Rowling planned from the start to wri...
Personally I would do the the following: Write them all. Get all your first drafts done. Review them all. Get to a decent second or third draft on all three. Send your first book to an editor. Wh...
"Both" can act as emphasis when one of the two is unexpected. In this usage, the unexpected one is placed second. For example, consider the difference between: Tom and his manager thought the...
There is a lamentable process by which averages become aphorisms. That is, we see a common pattern and turn it into an absolute rule. Adverbs are often used badly, so don't use adverbs at all. Writ...
Dialogue consists of two characters trying to get something from each other. Each has a desire that they want the other to fulfill. Each has some reluctance in fulfilling that desire, or else has d...
There is a kind of brainstorming process that some writers seem to go through when trying to come up with something to write about. It goes something like this. Can I take two apparently incompatib...
The Carnegie Hall method: Practice, practice, practice. You know those Word-A-Day calendars? We joke about them, but they're not bad as a starting point. Each day you pick a word you want to start...
I think the answer to this is, almost anything. More characters, fewer characters, different setting, different ending, longer, shorter, rougher, gentler. People get asked for all of these things a...
