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I used to do the same thing when I was first starting out. My sense is that it's because you are excited and inspired by The Thing, and you want more of The Thing, so you make more of it by mimicki...
There is no background in prose. The reader receives every word and they receive them one at a time. Thus there is no place to hide anything. Where you can be more subtle is in the connections be...
There is a fundamental difference between the desire to imitate and the desire to create. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the desire to imitate. Indeed, it is the foundation of our social or...
Fix it now. If you realize you made a mistake, go back and fix it now. Not, I stress, because the last 20K would be "wasted," because no writing is wasted, but because it's clearly blocking you an...
Stop writing and put it in a drawer. Go write something else for a while. There is no point in continuing when you know, as you clearly do, that this story is off the rails. It is not going to yi...
Start over; new file, using what you have as a reference. I've actually done it, put aside nearly 200 pages and begun anew. Your story problem is what I think of as the original "Star Trek" proble...
Can you think of other cases where there are multiple translation of the same book into the same language? If you search Amazon for classics in one language, do you find multiple translations into ...
A story is an experience, but it is an experience in which all the threads of that experience point at something, like the pattern the iron filings assume around the head of a magnet. If you have...
The only bad ideas are the ones which stop you from finishing the book. Write and edit if you like. Write halfway and edit. Write the whole thing blindfolded. Write only at night, or only during a...
I have begun writing a story about two city-states in the year 2307 in an arms race to create a time machine. The essence of your difficulty is right there in your opening sentence. Stories ...
Mark Baker is exactly right. Your story needs to be about a person (who can be a human, alien, small animal, android, werewolf, sentient car, or Groot). I needed to develop my characters to gi...
Writer Preference You'll find that a lot of the 'rules' of writing can be boiled down to what works for you. There are different ways to write. When giving advice, writers tend to assume you write...
The answer to this is crushing simple. You tell us that they are brother and sister. "Pass the butter," Pamela said. "Get it yourself," her brother replied. Don't try to slip information...
The job of the writer is not to convey emotion (or only in a secondary sense that I will come back to in a minute). The writer's job is to create emotion. A story is fundamentally an experience. ...
Inner conflict is the whole enchilada. All good stories lead up to a moment of crisis in which the protagonist must make a choice. That choice must be personally difficult. It must come at personal...
Worlds and their histories are abstractions. People don't live in worlds and they don't live in history. They live in a particular neighborhood at a particular time. Their horizons are small. Only ...
I use Excel. You do have to keep track of your own material — nothing will do it for you — but a basic spreadsheet with columns of Chapter, Scene, Location, Day of Week, Time of Day, and maybe Ch...
I like this idea. I was actually planning to use a similar technique in one of my own stories at once point. To address the bullet points in your question: It may be jarring to the reader. It c...
I don't know about "deeper questions" in a scene; but I generally reread what I have written, in its entirety, six to twelve times before I am satisfied. Even a 250+ page novel. And that is on top ...
Publishing a blog make a lot of sense for a non-fiction work. Almost all of my last non-fiction book appeared on my blog first and this had three big benefits: I got me lots of feedback on the qu...
Looks like I came up with my own approach in the end. At least, nobody seems to have mentioned it. LibreOffice Writer (and probably most other word processors) supports adding comments. They are d...
One way to think of plotting is in terms of desire and accidents. The point of a story is (usually) to bring one or more characters to the point where they must face a defining moral choice. What d...
Yes, you should put a disclaimer. I am not a lawyer, but I have read about defamation cases: Apparently the key to winning such cases is whether reading the book provides enough detail to identify ...
I think the question is a bit opinion based; and it depends on how evil the evil guy is. Is he just shoplifting once in a while, or getting into bar fights and breaking a finger or nose for the fun...
Just don't. Unless you are writing one of those nutty Dummies books, don't put emotion of humor in a technical book. The reason is not that technical subjects aren't funny or that technical peopl...
