Search
Both are criminals with no redeeming qualities There's your problem. You have a pair of one-dimensional cartoon supervillains who are evil just because. Those kinds of villains are unrealistic...
You can show more of this planning and anticipation in order to make it more plausible. Show your villain expending large resources and manpower in the pursuit of plans and alternatives. Take an i...
A German letter is not much different from a letter in any other language. The first thing to be aware of is whether it is in an official context or in a private context. For example if you are w...
Write the ending. Do it now. You can revise it later, or scrap it and write it over, but get your tears out of the way. I think you dread writing the outcome; face that dread and write it. Make it...
Long experience has taught many of us that when you send a busy person an email with more than one question, they only answer the first one and ignore the rest. Thus many of us have gotten into the...
I'm not sure that you do get through this. A story is an experience. To write the story, you have to live the experience, emotionally at least. When a story does not ring true, I think that is usua...
"The Old Man and the Sea" comes to mind as a novel where I don't recall any dialogue. Santiago talks to himself, talks to his hand, talks to the fish, etc., but that isn't really dialogue. Or, of y...
You can't be one hundred percent sure that you don't have any mistakes in your writing. It's the same as with testing a program - you can find bugs and be certain that a version therefore has flaws...
Together nothing can stop us. The problem with your intial idea is that you are saying that you are invincible for them. You are positioning yourself as a threat that can't be overcome, challe...
The central issue here is not the extent of description, it is focus. Good prose allows the reader to focus on one thing at a time. When it is time to describe, it describes. When it is time to dea...
Well, first off, like ItWasLikeThatWhenIGotHere mentioned, make sure to be careful with how you portray a real person. There are many possible ways to mess up, not least of which is libel which was...
Can you go overboard with this? Obviously you can go overboard with anything, but a few dead parents (or both parents dead, maybe even three parents dead (natural and adoptive) is within the ...
A screenplay is meant to be performed. A novel is meant to be read. (You can have an audio recording of a novel, but that's still someone reading it aloud, not a radio drama.) A screenplay has ...
Your problem is that your givens are incorrect. You don't need a colon, and you have the question mark in the wrong spot. Stripped of the confusing detail, your sentence reads Should I place ...
I agree with wetcircuit, this is a deus ex machina. I don't think it will help to show them more often, in the end they save the day and they are your heroes, not your MC. The hero is the one th...
It can be a nice way to show the past from a different point of view. As long as it's not only a long exposition of things that the other character should already know this can be very interesting ...
Create some conflict between the character hearing it and the character telling it. Don't just infodump the history. The exact nature of the conflict depends upon the relationship of the character...
Plot doesn't have to move at an even speed. Just as you can slow-motion over an important battle, you can speed up over long periods of time. A couple of paragraphs evoking boredom: staring at the ...
This is a somewhat usual start for something that goes in the direction of a horror story - which means it works for the general audience You will want your character to wake up and have a look at...
You say "the first quarter of the story". That is close enough to ACT I, the setup, and it ends with a crisis that propels the character into ACT II, in your case, capture by the government. You ar...
I personally would NOT recommend writing a second book while revising the first. It is important to keep the first book in your head as a whole, a second book in my head would result in a jumbled a...
The biggest risk is that you may lose the main characteristic of the narrator out of sight: to tell the reader what is important. There is nothing wrong with changing the point of view and paying...
Make the circumstances special Sitting on a chair is normal. Sitting on a chair because there is a bomb under it that will detonate the moment you stand up is not. Your character simply has to s...
No, there is no such option Looking through the official documentation and checking the query language document it appears that you can't simply use the advanced query script to write for example ...
I don't agree that all story conflicts are moral; I think that is a strange position. Here is how I understand Sanderson's theory. First, that each of the pairings can be used to create conflict. T...
