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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...
Yes, but it is not too many if they are necessary. That said, you should strive to eliminate them when they are NOT necessary. The reader knows who the subject of the sentence is. For example, in y...
Ask your manager This depends on lots of things, such as how long you've been waiting, how often you communicate with the client anyway, how clear the communication was that you can't proceed, how...
This is not legal advice and I am not a lawyer. Great question! I think the answer lies in this: But what about a big known brand, like Google? In a story set in our time, it would be rather ...
+1 to Neil, my thought was the same: When a replacement name risks breaking the reader's suspension of disbelief (SoD), you need to either circumvent the mention or use the real name. In the GGX c...
Mixing sci-fi elements into a mostly fantasy story has been done before. For example, Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern starts out as a typical fantasy series, and then turns out to have also b...
Great question! A great difficulty here is that there's not really much in the way of "professional beta readers." Someone who's really known for giving excellent feedback, and offers that as a se...
In classic story theory, a story begins in the normal world, the world from which the hero will be forced to depart and to which they will attempt to return, often transformed. This does not mean a...
I don't think you need any resource other than your own intelligence and self-awareness. We know when our slang is not "standard", just don't use it. Plus, it is ephemeral anyway, the 1920's "bee...
Your teacher is quite wrong, I believe. "People who do science" don't help you with anything. Maybe one of them sits down and explains things to you, but another is this unfriendly power-hungry sch...
There is no exact definition of "chapter", this is very much up to the author to decide. For myself, I consider it the first chunk of continuous time the reader will see, in the life of the main ch...
The first approach is accurate, the second approach is wrong: 1a. Science helps us understand nature, vs. 1b. People who do science help us understand nature. Science, in general (I am a scientis...
Our speech and writing is full of anthropomorphic language. We ascribe actions to inanimate objects and abstractions all the time. It is almost impossible to communicate effectively without doing t...
+1 Stephane. My own take is that if you are mentioning something like the weather, an emotional state, an article of clothing, a weapon, anything, it should have consequences in the story. So yes,...
Don't steal the plot, Don't steal their made-up words or made-up references, don't steal their (imaginative) tech, don't steal their characters or their unique combination of characteristics that m...
There are many examples of stories set in a post-apocalyptic space-faring human civilisation, with different takes on the idea. Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pe...
I would say it's best not to write this as a series of shots. The reason is because whether to break that up into multiple shots is a decision for the director and cameramen to make, not for you. ...
I think transitioning to screenwriting is quite difficult, and it is considerably MORE difficult to break into than novel writing. The competition is greater, the "need to be an insider" angle is v...
Inarticulate speech or sounds is an instance where I tell, I do not show. Shriek, Screech, Scream, Howl ... It can help if it startles somebody that comes bursting into the room to protect her, or...
As a discovery writer, I echo the sentiment that I absolutely control the direction of the story. I personally write with an end in mind; which I record as notes (not prose) about what finally hap...
You're worried that your own work is similar enough to a popular take on the genre, but substantially different from it -- so readers might be coming to it with the wrong expectations. That's a ve...
