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How many Harry Potters do you think there are in the phone book? Or James Kirks? Literature would be full of some truly strange and wonderful names if no character could have a name borne by any re...
I wouldn't just use fire and ice. The classic Four Elements (earth, air, fire, water) have been used for mythological and magical structures for many stories. Look at the Avatar: The Last Airbender...
There is story development and there is narration. You need to compose a story before you can narrate it. Some people are naturals at story development. For them the story flows so naturally that t...
Would this still be considered offensive by the majority of the readers? Nazis are offensive, period, so yes. The motivations of the good guys in Nazi garb will just come off as incongruous, i...
1) You're trying to write your final polished draft on your first shot. It won't happen. Focus on one goal at a time. First determine your substance. Then organize it. Then write it. Never mind how...
Is it ok to use fake words like that? If you are making up the culture, that is fine. Slang changes, year by year and city by city, all over the world. Some sticks longer than others, some eve...
I've had a look at allpoetry.com, a few review sites such as sitejabber.com and sites reporting about it such as PlagiarismToday.com. On their registration site they mention quite a huge number o...
One of the most common forms of dating in the pre-Christian era was by regnal dating. That is, events were recorded as occurring in such and such a year in the reign of king X. (For that matter, Ch...
I agree with this answer that developing characters will help you to write stories (which don't have to be full-blown books). Another approach you can take is to write very short stories or even j...
I was writing a similar story once. Building romance is not the easiest of things, so I feel you. I'd say that you have to put yourself in their shoes. Think of the most interesting or probable w...
You are writing a story, not a history. Were the characters of your story real people (which they are not) many things would happen to them in their day to day lives that are not in any way relevan...
In principle it works. Great magazine writers do it all the time. The thing is, at every turn of a story, you have to make the reader care. Detail for the sake of detail is just a distraction. If y...
I can't cite a style guide for this, only offer both observation and logic. Sanjay isn't a real person either, but you capitalized his name like you do for real people. That felt completely natur...
Prose cadence has mostly to do with making the emphasis in a sentence fall on the most important words: But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ...
I agree with ggiaquin answer, but I'd advise against giving the character some overly nasty habits if it isn't necessary just to make them more unsymphatetic, as other users have suggested. Adding...
The quotation marks themselves provide signal. By then tying the line of dialogue to an action in the same paragraph, it's clear that Kiyoshi is speaking. If anybody else were doing the speaking ...
This is all about where you want to direct the reader's attention. As a writer, you have almost total control over where the reader's attention is focused in a scene. If you write: A rabbit s...
Well, it is impossible to tell from what you have told us which of these problems you have, but there is a fairly easy test you can do to find out. Write character descriptions of real people you k...
Virtually none. Both the beginning and the end of a sentence are prominent positions to emphasize something. English allows for many variations of word order with the same semantics. The only effec...
Is it possible? Of course it is; almost everyone does it, in a form or another. How to do it well, now, is a whole other question. Avoid Interleaving Edit: Just to be sure, here I'm talking abou...
It depends on the rest of your text. I'd personally go with option 2, since it sounds more impersonal and straight-to-the-point, but if you already used something like the first option previously...
In Story, Robert McKee warns very strongly about the dangers of writing in scenes. His point is that what makes a story is its overall arc. Given a set of characters you have invented, each with a ...
First of all I'm not a doctor and good luck with your schizoaffective disorder. I cannot imagine the extent of its effect over your life; that's something you have to judge by yourself. But from ...
There are two parts of character development: the part which builds characters to tell your story, and the part which defines who those characters are/what they are like. I always start with the fi...
There are occasions where word choice is very important. These usually come where you are trying to express a new idea or make a distinction that people do not usually make. Each word takes the rea...
