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No matter how good your fanfiction is, no matter how good your fiction is, no matter how good anything you do is, there will be trolls using vile language to put you down. There's not much you can ...
Depending on the forum you post your fanfiction you will get those comments no matter what you do. It's a sad fact, but there are many people out there who just want to make others feel miserable a...
Oscar Wilde's work is in the public domain; so yes, you can copy and quote it directly, even without attribution. You are doing Wilde a favor by attributing the quotes to his book. It isn't a probl...
Stranger in a strange land. A foil. Create a tagalong character that needs explanations; a child, somebody new to the group, a good asset but a foreign born person that doesn't get pop references ...
Little Details is a livejournal fact-checking community for writers. They are not currently as active as I'd like, but you can find there huge amounts of tiny details for writers, sorted by topic. ...
If this character is to be either hero or villain, there must be something they want and do not know how to get, or that comes at a hefty price. There must be a goal not easily attained, or there i...
You do not need a degree to become a writer; you have the Internet. You can teach yourself what you need to know to become a writer; including some experiences you may not yet have (or may never ha...
Speaking as someone from the UK, I don't believe there is any such anonymity here. The suspect will be named as soon as the press finds out what their name is. The only exception is when they're un...
This is, indeed, the translator's job. For example, here's Gili Bar-Hilel, talking about translating the Harry Potter books into Hebrew: Fantasy books are often full of imaginary words created...
You can make it so the MC doesn't get everything he wants, and at the end of the setup may get into the unit of his choice, but loses something else along the way. Give him a friend whose goal i...
To me, Stephen King's advice (as seen in a live interview, and asked what advice he had for aspiring writers): Basically he said, if you want to write, write. Every day. Don't worry about plotting...
I don't know about "looking back" and "career", I'm still rather looking forward to that... :) That said, one piece of advice that really struck me, stuck with me and stayed with me is Neil Gaiman'...
+1 Cloudchaser, I'd go further and say foreshadowing should NEVER be close to the event. But it doesn't have to be on page 1, or page 50. As I said in my answer to your previous foreshadowing ques...
Add an additional point of uncertainty. "Will the story progress" is not an interesting stakes. But nothing's keeping you from adding other stakes that will grip the reader. Consider, for example:...
I have another answer, earlier, about motivations. I am not combining this one into it, because it answers the question more literally. The most fundamental advice I can give that I wish I had kno...
The determining criteria will be how much information the reader needs. Generally you want to use flashback for a few reasons. 1) Need to know protag and/or context for emotional impact. A battle...
You should be able to answer a few questions here. Why is the flashback necessary for the story? What does it add or change, that makes this a better story than without it? Why is the flashback i...
Personally, I would regard this more as a critique of the notion of a topic sentence than as and evidence of skilled writing. The theory of the topic sentence is part of a theory of paragraph desig...
I would write to shorter limits. Following roughly the three act format. Use 30% for the first act. introduce the world and your MC; 5% to 10%. Write your inciting incident; begin at the 15% mar...
In addition to real war veterans whom you don't want to hurt, there's one more side to WWII. Intellectually, I know that there were good people and less good people among American troops at the tim...
Don't focus on him being a "veteran". Yes, he was in a war, blah blah. You don't ever have to use the word "veteran." If you do, have him use it to game the system or seek sympathy; even veterans...
A story is how long it is. The short story is a spare medium to begin with. You can't make a decently written story of X words X-500 words without taking something away from the story itself. I t...
The paragraph is a very ill-defined unit of composition, and the rules of paragraph writing that they teach in schools (which is a kind of mini-essay format) has not a lot to do with how actual wor...
You can do almost anything if you make it a story. Want to foreshadow something that will happen in chapter 5. That's fine, as long as you do it in the context of a story in chapter 1. A novel is a...
Bootcamp is a harrowing experience. (Been there, done that.) You can make it interesting simply by having your character struggle through it, mentally and physically. It's usually more interesting ...
