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Maybe it helps if you just change your viewpoint. You probably have written the mail with the viewpoint “I want this job.” Instead, consider the viewpoint ”The company will need to refill that job,...
The only way I see to maintain the effect you're talking about is not to use pronouns. You can use the character's name. You can use their profession / rank / etc. You can say "we did", "they did" ...
In the 1990s, I was really hoping that the Z or X pronouns (zie & zir, xie & xir) would win for the non-gender-focused option - they follow the he/she pronunciation style, which indicates s...
My advice is to provide rough therapy in the book. Accompany your suicidal character with a counterweight character. This does not have to be somebody that loves them, nor does it have to be a main...
In writing a resurrection, you need to balance several conflicting ideas: on the one hand, the death of the character should be a possibility. Otherwise, this death is cheap, meaningless. "He died,...
Jane Austen routinely did what it sounds like you want to do: she kept the big places intact (London, Bath), but the estates mentioned in her stories (e.g. Pemberly) are fictional, with only their ...
And yet somehow, every year, new authors sell blockbusters and earn $millions. JK Rowling went from nobody to being worth nearly half $billion. So did Dan Brown, so did Stephen King, to name a few...
The hero fought the good fight, as best they could, and that fight is done. To me, for happy or sad endings (of a book or character within a book), and assuming the rest of the book makes the read...
My personal creative mantra is cribbed straight from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya: If it doesn't already exist, I should just make it myself. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever...
"E.g." is an abbreviation for the Latin "exempli gratia", which means "for example". The abbreviation is fairly common in "advanced" writing, like theses, in my experience. However, it's an other...
Make up anything you like (without violating copyrights and trademarks). Outside of intellectual property laws, the whole point of fiction is to exercise your imagination. That said, if you writ...
I'm a discovery writer; meaning I write without a plot, and see what happens. I don't have written character histories, or back stories, or a laundry list of traits or descriptions. If I need a phy...
The Rule of Three. In another context, this has been studied scientifically by psychologists. AKA the 80/20 rule, and the law of diminishing returns. Specifically the study of mentality suggests ...
@Amadeus and @DPT both provide great answers. I will add one consideration to their answers, an aspect @DPT mentions, but doesn't elaborate on. It's not just how much description you have, how man...
There are two ways religious concepts appear in speech. First, there are common expressions: "Oh my god", "go to hell", etc. Those are a natural part of our speech, we hear them all the times and ...
This depends on the character. You're quite right to realize that the set of images a character will use, should depend a lot on that character's "inner lexicon"; on the particular imagery that ch...
Yes, agnostics and atheists can do anything they want with religious language! I am another atheist, and a practicing scientist at a university. I don't regard any entity in any religion as real o...
Not using real brands can give you more creative freedom Funnily enough, I have an example of this from just the other day. I was writing a scene where my protagonist meets his soon-to-be love int...
Publishers certainly don't always remove brands. Two example from Jim Butcher's Dresden Files: "I'm hungry," he said, his voice a low growl. "We can hit a McDonald's or something on the way h...
It doesn't sound like either to me; if your words are different they are different. Plagiarism is straight up copying text from another writer. Copyright too. Similar ideas are quite common; the no...
Write what you enjoy. Even professional authors have written first books they couldn't sell, and even when famous wouldn't sell without rewriting them from page 1. It is difficult to sell a first ...
Are “non-readers” useful beta readers? I don't think so. People that don't read, don't enjoy reading. They don't like that kind of fiction, they don't know what is good and bad, it is all bad ...
Assuming that by "non-readers" you mean "people who are not fans of the genre you write", they can be useful beta-readers. Here are some points for you to consider, in no particular order. Being ...
Using a real-life brand or famous name actually subtracts from your story. If you invent your own world-class practitioner, you can hype him as the world's best, better than your real life one, un...
I take the advice of Stephen King and Orson Scott Card; write every day. I have read of other professionals that, even with another job have treated writing as a job, writing for a specified amount...
