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Writing is all about conditioning the reader's expectations. All the big effects in writing come from an appropriate setup. If you want to show a result contrary to the narrator's expectations, you...
How and where you cite depends entirely on your audience. For school reports and academic/scientific papers, you use formal citations both in the body of the text and in footnotes or endnotes. Y...
You talk of your characters as one or two basic characteristics, and that's it. That's where your problem is. There is more to a person than a short tag. Think about your friends. Chances are, you ...
Tone and intonation can matter a lot Personality can set a tone for a character. A hero and an antihero might do the exact same things: they dress up as guards, infiltrate the Evil Overlord's base...
The key is to write a person, not a pet dog in the form of a female companion / love interest. A person is a complex, with aspirations, motivations, interests, and a personality. And now you hav...
As far as I'm aware, generally translators are paid to do a translation (by number of words, pages, ...) by the copyright holder or the publisher who will then sell this translation. This might de...
This is quite the tricky question. I am going to assume that the character you describe is your protagonist. How To The character you describe is best classified as a "sociopath": a person wi...
I would have a document like the one @Galastel suggests, which makes good sense for 'characterizing your characters', but I also keep a 'mindmap' with a visual representation of how all my characte...
The kinds of criticisms you are encountering are not aimed against the concept of the hero having a love interest. They are aimed against female characters that that exist only as a motivation for ...
Your question starts out asking about plot holes but then you appear to shift to asking about humor and parody. Those are not at all the same thing. I suppose you could describe both as "the story ...
I will agree with both Anna Fitgerald and Viktor Katzy: First, as Viktor says, I don't think saving the sociopathy for the end is a good idea, and Second, as Anna says, if the narrator knows her ...
In the end, the story you are creating will either be convincing or not. But being logically coherent has little to do with making a story convincing. (The fact that there is an entire YouTube subc...
Does your story have a character who starts out as a loyal supporter of the protagonist, but later realizes what a monster she is, and then turns against her? If so, that character is an ideal nar...
This is super easy, barely an inconvenience. Have a world with multiple multiple demons/devils all pretending to be a god and trying to gain power over each other by gaining followers. And they ...
You don't have to diagnose it as "PTSD" or whatever name WE use for it, but you can have a character call it out as a real thing: They are an expert, they have seen many soldiers with a similar col...
In my opinion: you should let the condition speak for itself. I agree with Alexander when he says that people who hold authors' feet to the fire are overblowing things, as a lot of these people wou...
I personally wouldn't find it unrealistic that people in any country today mocked somebody for the way their name sounds in English. I'd say keep it. I'm aware that not all countries have a capac...
As a life long player of the best known 4X game, Civilization, the "story" of the series is the rise to power of your "empire" and much of the play is about becoming the strongest world power on th...
It's totally fine. It expresses a combination of query and astonishment. There was even an attempt to combine the marks into one, called an interrobang, but it never caught on. Using "?!" is neithe...
I agree with others here that if you've been told not to make changes in style, it's likely that the writer's interpretation was that you should leave things like this alone. But you're the proof ...
I believe that is incorrect. A single call is calling for multiple proposals for addressing a single task, hence "A call for proposals". If there are multiple tasks, you emit multiple calls, each a...
Descriptive Words You are looking for descriptive adjectives and adverbs. If you look at the two passages you've provided, you'll notice that the first is almost devoid of adjectives and adverbs, ...
Build yourself an excuse for knowing what you wish to reveal; the story you are currently telling was related to you by others. When Rodrick first told Geoffrey's tale, he tells us, on this jou...
I think this is a really interesting question - because if we avoid using advanced vocabulary with children, then when are they supposed to learn it? I think the answer is that it's a matter of qu...
Klippy, your intuition is correct. Your audience comes first. It’s the reason why you write the book. It doesn’t matter who else reads it, its only important that it pleases your audience. A pleas...
