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Torturers don't need to be fit or strong, they need to be possibly scary, knowledgeable, and competent at what they do. There are a lot of kinds of torture and "beating someone senseless" is just o...
Stories "ripped from the headlines" are always good sellers -- the interest in their subject matter is being actively aroused by current events. Writing a novel is a long business, so to be able to...
I think you have to start by making a fundamental distinction between good and conformant. Obeying a set of rules makes something conformant but it does not make make it good. A Lada is conformant ...
Sometimes this is an intentional clue; for example in The Green Mile, the miracle-performing character is named John Coffey; and Stephen King says he intentionally gave him the same initials as Jes...
There is always a temptation to be didactic. At least, that is always a temptation for me. Having got your character into some sticky situation, there is a temptation to treat them as you would a c...
They are your family. They will be biased. That doesn't mean they can't lend constructive criticism if you really impress on them how important it is that they be unbiased. Be very clear about sayi...
Your family may be biased, and they may be too kind, but the deeper problem is that they will be interested in your story because you wrote it and they are interested in you. Thus they are in no po...
Someone who deserves to be smeared over a brick wall doesn't have reedeming features. That's not to say the villain is stupid, or one-dimensional, or his/her only motive is "I like to be eeeeeeevi...
You can turn Zeus into a flower pot if you want to. It's your book. The myths are public domain and the vast majority of the population has no idea of the details of any of the myths.
Try this to break the cycle: Go Analytic! When you begin to doubt, or don't know what to write next, Start a new paragraph with some knots (&&&) and explain why what you wrote doesn't...
Only everyone ever, to the point where it is a classic cliche of the writer: the writer sitting in front of a typewriter beside a large wastepaper basket overflowing with bits of crumpled paper, an...
Your construction is poor. Your first line effectively says "I am ignoring all debate about rationality and applying my own definition, a decision is rational when it satisfies condition X." Why r...
The paragraph is the most indistinctly defined unit in all of writing theory. In the 19th century it was common for paragraph to run on of a page or two. Today, they often run only a few lines. Fo...
One writer's opinion: Heroes: Begin here: They engage in altruistic risk and sometimes sacrifice; and the audience sees that. Many Germans that hid Jews from the Nazis did not get caught, so they...
One good way to write about Very Important Opinions is to begin in an idyllic world complying with the Very Important Opinions; but one that has been idyllic for so long that they have relaxed thei...
Lots of great authors had very important opinions. Dickens. Steinbeck. Solzhenitsyn. Dostoyevsky. What they all understood is that a story is not a vehicle to express an opinion, but a vehicle for ...
D.E.M. implies an implausible [to the audience] save; and there is no value to that. The minute the audience finds a story development implausible they lose interest; this is the point when they tu...
I don't think you have a point of view problem, I think you have a storytelling problem. You are trying to introduce a character without introducing them, identify them without identifying them. ...
I doubt many of these terms have very precise definitions, and I am probably not the best authority on their meaning, but here is what I would take these terms to mean: Serious fiction: Not genre ...
"I smiled. I ate. I spoke. I listened. I left." If you are going to write from a depressed point of view, I don't think these are the thoughts of a depressed person. For a depressed person, t...
Killing the opposition; even brutally, is an understandable trait of a villain. Mass "impersonal" killing (setting a bomb, firing a missile, exploding a nuclear weapon) are understandable traits, t...
Betrayal elicits stronger negative emotions than mere villany. The traitor, the false friend, we hate more than we hate an honest enemy. The betrayer adds the wounding our our pride to their other ...
Well, more to the point, no agent is going to want to read a sequel to a book they don't represent because no publisher is going to want to publish a sequel to a book that they did not publish. The...
The basic patterns of story are as old as the hills and they are not going away or losing any of their potency. It is always and forever in the execution. But I think you need to stop thinking in...
Write it anyway. Most authors have to write a few books before they publish one. Don't think your idea is going to be your one and only idea ever. Some of my published work I have rewritten entire ...
