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I don't know what "Naruto-like hand symbols" are, but from the context of the question, I am going to assume they are some kind of complex hand gestures used to cast spells (or something similar). ...
Your premise is flawed: the characters that are killed are not disposable in the sense that it doesn't matter whether they are killed or not. Quite often they are peoples favourites, which makes th...
In a way, all characters are disposable; you are their god, you are free to kill characters or keep them alive, as suits your Grand Plan. The question is rather what suits your grand plan - what ki...
As the other answers have noted, the cast of Game of Thrones do not count as "disposable characters". A character is only really disposable if their only contribution to the plot is getting killed ...
I think you mean "filler," not pulp. In fiction "pulp fiction" meant stuff printed on very cheap paper, and by implication "cheap" both in writing and production values. Filler is anything that c...
The alternative is to stop listening to people who say silly things like that. There is, unfortunately, a sub-culture of writers who obsess over the minutia of prose without having any actually s...
I would not start with a volcano opening, I think that is your mistake. A story does not start with that, a story has to start with "the status quo" world of the MC. The reason for that is two-fol...
You don't have to explain much in sociopathy. Read Understanding the Sociopath: Cause, Motivation, Relationship, in "Psychology Today." An excerpt: In the media, I'm often asked what causes so...
There's really only one plot: Somebody has a problem, and must deal with it. If that isn't true, there isn't really a story, just some descriptions of things. You might subdivide that into [happy...
Here's an important thing to remember: at the heart of your novel are the characters. Nobody is going to read something that looks and feels like a history schoolbook, only it's "alternative" histo...
Let me point you to the relevant TV Tropes page: Torture Porn In brief, torture porn is when a work gives a lot of attention to the torture, describes it in great detail, apparently not so much to...
Porn in general shows something for the excitement of it in and of itself. In a story, authors stray into porn when what we are showing does not advance the story, build character, or have any ram...
Vocabulary alone isn't enough to make your book interesting. In fact, if your story is too heavy with obscure words, it might become hard to read and off-putting. That said, growing your vocabular...
Yup, I'm quite familiar with that feeling, in both my creative writing and my academic writing. (Albeit, it doesn't depress me - it makes me facepalm, grunt my teeth, and start revising. But the fr...
If you find it easier to write the novel in third-person, then you should write the novel in third-person. Regarding how to handle switching first-person perspectives, I'm sure there's a question a...
The Easy Part. You have the Internet! You can research places, slang, and to some extent the culture of Americans, or British, in order to write your story. You have travelogues, you have some Ame...
Speaking as both a professor and corporate division manager at different points in my life: Your cover letter is not your CV, and (as said by ItWasLikeThat) you should not try to cram your CV into ...
Love to Hate: To love to hate a villain, the villain must be clever, must outsmart the protagonist, and must usually (nearly always) win. They must be competent and difficult to defeat. The audie...
As everyone else notes, In Medias Res only means "in the middle of things." It does not necessarily mean a climax, or action, or foreshadowing the ending. For example, if I were writing a Sherlock...
Trust your subconscious. I would say, do not stop writing, do not break your habit of writing every day. Just stop writing THAT. Do some other writerly stuff, on this project or a different one. ...
This is my understanding, I don't have a reference for you to look at it. The "proposal" is either a description of the work you propose to write, or (almost always) a short description of the wor...
I'll side with your editor. Why do you need two jolly characters, or two stern characters? I wouldn't worry about mannerisms, I am more interested in purpose, intent, attitude and conflict. I thi...
The principles you must rely on are plausibility and connectedness. For example, in the space of 30 minutes I can have ten bad things happen to somebody, if they are connected to each other. A wa...
An acknowledgement page in novels usually appears in the end, rather than the beginning as you would see in scientific writings. There's one in Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel, t...
You mean, what if you're a resident of country A, writing about a citizen of country B travelling in country C? Go ahead, enjoy yourself. Jules Verne, for example, had never visited the places he ...
