Search
A character is a bundle of desires. They are defined first by their primary desire: the thing that is driving their action in the story. Second, they are defined by their secondary desires, the thi...
Most works of art bear the artist's name. Most works of craft do not. The person who paints your portrait signs their work. The person who paints your house, or your sign, does not. Using a ghost...
I haven't used it in years, and it may be better now, but my experience was that it would periodically misinterpret whole phrases. The problem was not that it made more errors than I did typing -- ...
Theme is not necessarily a message. It is more the thing that you are exploring. If the theme is love, for instance, you don't have to take a position on love, you don't have to have a covert messa...
I just wanted to write a story about these two friends. So, maybe that is your theme. That friendship is beautiful, rich, enduring; that friends help each other through obstacles, or despite t...
A character that is not lucid enough to see or interpret what is going on around them is not lucid enough to have a POV. If they are not lucid and you say: Something poked her shoulder. Then ...
Your characters may not have names, but they have to have some identifiers. Other examples in fiction: Star Trek's Borg use designations which specify where each drone (individual) is in the hi...
yes, and in fact I encourage this. If it's from a child's POV, try to use a child's language, understand and perspective. Don't stress so much about what's "allowed." Do what seems to work for you...
There are no rules. There is a lot of advice. Some of it is good. Some of it is bad. A lot of it is generalized inappropriately. There are also a lot of conventions which it is safer to follow unle...
There is nothing terribly wrong with the sentence structure per se, but it has an effect that may or may not be desirable, and probably is not desirable quite as often as you are doing it: it chang...
Writers often indulge a charming fantasy that publisher and agents are looking for originality. They are not. They are looking for works that fit into a well established sales channel and that habi...
Finish the story. Finish it whether it's one book, two, or five. Writing is practice for writing; editing is practice for editing. No effort is wasted. If you have two or three really good books,...
If the POVs seem balanced (rotating one per chapter or in some other predictable pattern), then it's not breaking any rule. For length -- the projected draft is 225k -- maybe the actual draft wo...
The danger you can run into with that kind of detailed planning (there are dangers in all approaches to a large piece of work) is that it can lead you to focus on plot at the expense of conflict. ...
Make it clear that it's from Character B's POV. Don't overthink it. It's okay to create a structure and break it for an effect.
Actually, most stories that have a specific antagonist depend on the antagonist being stronger than the protagonist, so logically the antagonist should win most of the time -- unless they do someth...
You can certainly have an ensemble cast, and you can certainly send a team on a shared quest. Hundreds of novels and movies do exactly that. But while a team can have a shared plot, a plot is not t...
This is the reality of the thing: there are hundreds of thousands of people who would like to have written a novel. Many of them are willing to spend a considerable amount of money to advance their...
I'm struggling at the moment to think of a novel which does have a subtitle (beyond "A Novel" to differentiate it from a non-fiction work). Look at the NYT Best Books of 2016. Not one novel has a...
Stories are an attempt to endow life with meaning. Where ordinary life seems possessed of a terrible randomness, we look to stories to assure us that there is actually meaning and purpose in life. ...
If you want people to sympathize or identify with a character who does awful things, then the people she's doing those things to have to be worse than her. They have to deserve the manipulation and...
Generally speaking, humor comes from the unexpected. You anticipate that A will happen, but B happens instead. Someone says "I want to give up cigarettes and switch to vaping." You expect that th...
It is well said that there are no rules in funny. A traditional story needs a specific story shape in order to work because the payoff is in the climax and denouement. But comedy, though it can con...
There are two versions of "the reader can't figure out the ending." One is Sherlock Holmes, and the other is Murder by Death. In the Holmes stories, the reader doesn't necessarily see all the deta...
Words individually do not give the feeling of any genre. It is how you put them together to create a picture in the reader's mind. Just as a painter may use the same pallet of colors to paint a uni...
