Search
I once saw someone in your situation address the problem by adding a (gendered) middle name to signatures. This could either be your real middle name if you have one, or a nickname that you're pre...
How is far more important than What. Look at successful entertainments (by how many they sell, not whether critics loved them or not), and the settings are mostly standard fare, many of them set in...
Do not say "written boldly", everybody knows what a "football shirt" looks like. A "football shirt" is a "jersey", the reader will know it is a football jersey by any single mention of football. ...
The novel is one of the most complex pieces of art that humans create, and the enjoyment of novels can be based on many different characteristics. Without trying to be exhaustive, we could distingu...
My complaint about Paolini was that he took a reasonably generic plot idea and... wrote it generically. His worldbuilding wasn't original, in any capacity. His characters were boring. His elves wer...
Authors often look to synonym dictionaries to find words different than what first occurs to them, but this is generally NOT to achieve rhythm, but to find a more accurate or evocative word for wha...
First, make sure that you are not subconsciously trying to write a movie fight scene. Movie fight scenes are all about movement and noise (and generally far too long and tedious for anyone older th...
Use a courtesy title which reflects your gender. Sign your submission as "Ms. Morgan Meredith." Subtle but unambiguous.
This is all about recognition. The user may recognize the component being mentioned by name (verbal) or by sight (visual). Recognition by name is sufficient in most cases. If you are going for re...
To quote Batman: "The hammer of justice is unisex." Your hero isn't fighting the villain because she's a woman. He's fighting her because she's a villain. And since she isn't a femme fatale who us...
This is where the show don't tell doctrine becomes particularly pernicious. It is all telling. All you have is words. All words can do is tell. To apply show don't tell to prose, you have to show...
TV series, if they take outside scripts (some are only written internally), will sometimes have "protected characters" and "protected topics", that may not even be the main character, but your stor...
These are style questions and mostly a matter of opinion; but if the matching is intended to help the user recognize the key, then if I were writing a manual I would match the italics, and if possi...
Chapters are not necessary, but help readers understand what is happening. There ARE chapters in films, signaled by "establishing shots", the first orientation shot that tells the viewer the time/...
The only way you can really pull this off convincingly is through humility. If you are to approach a person you disagree with with sympathy, you have to start with the notion that they are neither ...
It depends on the more subtle meaning you wish to convey. The obvious solution would be to combine it into one sentence: Rebecca lived in the same building as my wife and I, and was one our cl...
Realistic detail does not necessarily mean describe unimportant characters in greater detail - it may for example mean more details about the environment Judging from the comment conversation it s...
If your narrator knows about it and regularly tells the reader things that no character can possibly know it's fine If you are using a narrator that doesn't know more about the characters it would...
How can I prepare the player for that? You don't. It's quite simple: you don't want to prepare your player throughout the game of this aspect. You want it to be something special. Most games ...
I don't know about video game fiction; in novels and movies, epilogues are typically very short, and used for the explanation of the future. In a movie, just a few minutes (2 or 3 pages, about 2% o...
There are two lines of thought that come to my mind: First, this is a first person narrative, so the narration happens at some time after all that happened. Now, having done such a horrible thing,...
Think about it this way: surely you've read literature translated from another language? For example, Les Miserables, set in France. All characters speak French. Hugo doesn't need to tell you that ...
Don't worry - everything has been done before; just try to be yourself Your goal shouldn't be to be the only one to ever blog about something. This is especially true for fiction as there are only...
This is an "I have chosen the wrong point of view for the story I want to tell. How do I make it work anyway?" question. We get them a lot. The answer is, change the point of view so that the sto...
I don't think this story will work, or your solutions are viable, for the reasons you wrote. You violate reader trust from the beginning, the first person narrator knows he intends to kill everyone...
