Search
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...
Thought experiment: If Dan Brown had required the permission of the Vatican to publish The Da Vinci Code, do you imagine it would ever have been granted? Do you think the Pentagon or the White Hous...
In story, character is desire. Character is the things you want and the things you are willing to do, or not willing to do, to get the thing you want. Some stories hang a lot of rich detail on thes...
I have gone to my local bookstore to order a self-published book. I gave them the ISBN, they ordered it, it arrived a week later, I walked in and completed the transaction. The book is now on my sh...
In addition to this answer here: What's the best way to show a foreign language in a manuscript? If you have a lot of swapping back and forth between two specific languages, and the characters are...
There really is no way to indicate that you are using a term in a non-technical sense if you use it in a context in which the technical sense would normally be inferred. The best approach to avoidi...
I'm not sure if what you are describing is unreliable narrator at all. An unreliable narrator is not one who is mistaken about facts. An unreliable narrator is one who is deliberately deceiving the...
A story must always be a story, which is to say that it must have a story arc. The arc of a story is fundamentally built around desire and the things people will or will not do to achieve their des...
The notion of "willing suspension of disbelief" is one of the most misleading phrases in the literature of writing (right up there with "show don't tell"). It is very much worth reading Tolkien's O...
In reality, if you found an ancient scroll written in Old English from a 1000 years ago, it would probably still be unintelligible to the modern person! If you worry about it, I'd give your charac...
It depends on what you want to accomplish with the scene, and the character. Neither one is better writing per se. They do have slightly different tones, and slightly different meanings. "When y...
The point of fiction is not to make statements. If you want to make statements, write an essay. The point of fiction is to give the reader an experience. The reader may, of course, reach a conclu...
Rhetorically speaking, your conclusion should not be a mere summing up of arguments already presented. Rather, it should build a rising tide of emotion and conviction to carry your reader irresisti...
There are two basic uses of magic in literature. One is as a catalyst for a cautionary tale on the dangers of power. Examples of this include The Lord of The Rings and A Wizard of Earthsea. The for...
Booksbyweight appears to be simply a used bookstore with a bulk pricing model. In the paper world the economic model for books is that the publisher sells copies. The copy then belongs to the per...
You can have as many subjects as you like; you can only have one story arc. Or, at least, you can only have one story arc per character. Do all of these aspects of the protagonist's life contribute...
I definitely noticed the alliterations. They stood out, and were frankly jarring. If you were writing poetry, or prose which is echoing poetry, I'd tell you to go for it, but if your point is to te...
The people in your story might not know anything about Earth, but your readers do. You can show lighter gravity by describing things that couldn't happen on Earth -- a person out for a jog boundin...
Robert McKee maintains that people don't change, and that a story arc is not about them changing, but about showing how far they will go. A story arc, per McKee, consists of a character with a desi...
As you rightly perceive, this is about sacrifice. It is about loss. It is about how much the character is willing to bleed for this. The implication of this is that much of the story has to be ded...
