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It all depends on the moral structure of the story. At the heart of every story is a choice about values. (With great power comes great responsibility, etc.) The more conventional structure would...
The "Build up to it" route is the conventional way to tell the story. The progression is more or less linear. The protagonist's struggle to unlock the power is bound together with his struggle agai...
In a month or two I will have a book out on how to do things like this (Structured Writing: Rhetoric and Process, from XML Press). The big question is, what are you going to use to do the selecti...
You were right about your own taste. You may have been right about the taste of many other people as well. But as a general principle, you were wrong. Fiction is fiction. Fiction is all the stuff...
This would be a technically advanced solution, but if you are comfortable coding, you might want to use a database management system (DBMS). One you probably already have is Micorsoft Access (comes...
If you are having problems with describing sound leave it to the imagination of your readers - just state what is causing the sound. If your characters can see or simply know that it's an oar hit...
It depends. In these matters, it always depends. It it advances or enriches the story, leave it in; if not, leave it out. There is no general rule that says such and such a thing always advances th...
If the argument is a minor one, and the characters are people you'd expect to generally get along (good friends, parent/child etc.), you can safely skip the making up. In long-term relationships of...
This is not a feature that you have to turn on in Scrivener - it's a general setting you have to use in Mac and apps like Scrivener would have to use this setting From macworld.com: "How to fix ty...
It looks like a fish bowl had a baby with a bike helmet. Images, not adjectives, are what you need to describe something that does not look like anything conventional. You won't get close to the de...
Only describe the important stuff that will play a role later and gloss over everything else with very broad descriptions - readers prefer their own mental image if it's not relevant for the story....
A question is a question. The reader may not understand if you don't put the question mark at the end. If you're reading outloud, a sentence with a question mark at the end would curve up, but if i...
Take your pick from the online power thesaurus: F**k S**t The most common upvoted items are "screw" and "crap", respectively.
If she really does have intellectual superiority and knows it, then it is not pompous to tell the truth, and in fact would be deceptive to deny it. Nor is it "condescending" for a highly intelligen...
If you feel that it will get harder to write if you read another similar book, then what I'd suggest would be to plan your story, then read similar books, or finish your story then read books to im...
Obviously this is 100% my opinion, there is no hard and fast rule. Consider how many scenes are in King's epic book The Stand: I bought it when it first came out and I couldn't put it down. What is...
Every person has a style in which he or she talks. If your characters read like people who would use words such as ass than it would be weird if they talked about their posterior. But if your narra...
Personally, I would write a great deal before I ever read somebody else's work, specifically to ensure that what I write is NOT derivative or copied from somebody else. I do not mean to finish a n...
In my experience: absolutely. Back in 2016 I started writing (very slowly) an anime-inspired romantic dramedy about a 30-year-old NEET whose life has fallen apart. A few months ago I was alerted t...
Write your sales pitch to Yourself. For a diary or anything else that requires a long or daily commitment (like writing a novel or exercise or jokes), I would start by writing WHY you want to do i...
Flashbacks are fine and used all the time. In film in particular, this is part of "show don't tell" the story, and what that phrase originally meant: Anything you want to say, try to put in action ...
This is a Buyer's Market. +1 'Friday Night in Frankfurt'. If you send query letters and they respond, you do not have long to send in a manuscript, you are going to leave yourself with about a wee...
"Shall I meet you..." is fine, but you would try and make it sound pleasant. Maybe you are looking forward to it, or maybe you could talk to them about something interesting, then say something lik...
There are many ways to express the same thought - many more than you might realize. Vocabulary The first thing is the difference between active and passive vocabulary, also known as productive an...
I'm personally fond of the term amanuensis, and while I hardly ever get to use it, this sounds like the perfect legitimate need: A person employed to write or type what another dictates or to c...
