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This seems like a great idea, and possibly the best way to approach this would be to have the time of disorientation be relatively brief. I've not written dream sequences ever, so I don't have any...
(Apologies if this question has already been asked. I've looked around but can't find this specific question, only related ones.) The general advice seems to be "don't start your story with dialog...
Is it possible to make a living as a novelist? Yes, a few people do. Is it sensible to plan on making a living as a novelist, the way you might plan on making a living as a dentist or an accountan...
Design is the stage. Story is the play. Story is built around desire and the frustration of desire. The stage exists as a place for that desire to be born, to be frustrated, and to be ultimately ac...
The trick that most novels use is not to describe what is thought beautiful in that world. In most novels, when a character is supposed to be beautiful, this is simply stated, and it is up to the r...
A character does not have to be named, but they do have to be identified, otherwise the reader gets lost. If you don't identify them by name, then you should identify them by some defining characte...
There are various ways to handle this, depending on how you want the scene to come across. Vague. That is to say, the reader knows they had sex by reasonable inferrence. You end one scene with the...
I would suggest a hybrid approach, keeping in mind the comments by @mbakeranalecta. How about only having certain chapters as diary entries? These would focus on the pieces where your MC has to sho...
I have done quite a lot of reading on the question of talent, and apparently what we perceive as talent is a combination of an inborn potential to be good at a certain task (for writing: creativi...
Falling in love has the quality that you are often not fully conscious of it while it is happening. The moment where you articulate to yourself that you are in love with someone can often come as a...
The other answers are good but they strike me as abstract. Maybe I'm a philistine, but I like my advice concrete and practical. Different people naturally use different: Vocabulary Sentence leng...
Unless the copyright protection period has expired, those works are copyright and if you use them without permission, you could be sued. Copyrights are property and are part of the estate of a dece...
The convention in scientific writing, at least in the hard sciences, is to avoid "I" even for single-author papers. I suspect (but can't prove) that this is why you see so much passive voice in su...
In a story I use the Japanese words konnichiwa and kawaii: "Konnichiwa!" greeted a voice. "Wanna cuddle with a cutie for a couple of minutes?" She beamed a kittenish kawaii smile. I t...
You don't. That is a TV thing. The page is not the screen. How you tell a story in each medium is an artifice. You are never reproducing all the elements of real conversation, all the halts and t...
Show vs tell is an overblown and misunderstood idea imported into fiction writing from screenwriting. It was originally coined to train novelists to write for the screen. (You can see how novel-lik...
English is a development of Anglo Saxon and old Norse with many borrowings from Latin, mostly via Norman French, thanks to the Norman conquest of 1066. For a long time after the conquest, the nobil...
I think you can get away with it, using an approach such as Lauren suggests, with one important caveat. You need to make sure that the stakes are higher than last time. If you have not raised the s...
I think the question you are really asking is, is the backstory the story you want to tell, or is it simply a fable on which the real story is based. None of us can answer that for you. If I had to...
Human being have a inbred psychological need for stories. Like all our other needs, there are specific receptors that have to be matched for the need to be satisfied. If the body does not recognize...
The people in your story might not know anything about Earth, but your readers do. You can show lighter gravity by describing things that couldn't happen on Earth -- a person out for a jog boundin...
Yes, it can be done. But I would think twice about it. A novel should be about telling a story. It should not be about seeing if you can pull off an unconventional storytelling technique. People ...
Let me approach this another way. The idea of a maturation plot occurs in more than one of the various schemas for classifying plots by type. Those schemas divide plots into multiple types, but the...
I'll approach this from a different angle than the two great answers already here. Let's assume that yes, your story is too similar to an existing, fairly well-known property. How do you fix that? ...
If you're working in a group, check the level of detail of existing documentation, and ask for guidance from your group leader, or a co-worker who seems to know what's what. Picture an imaginary r...
