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In a nutshell, the answer is, humanity. A more human character is more memorable. The great authors are those who seem to have the greatest insight into what it means to be human. I don't think tha...
I’m writing on my master thesis/dissertation and performed Chi-square tests to my check for statistical significance. I'll present the results of these tests in a table. Now I’m wondering if I sho...
It seems complicated, but it isn't. Even the word act is misleading, because you can have a one-act play, with an entire drama taking place in that one act. That's an artificial structure. A true ...
There are certainly people who will perform a substantive edit on a manuscript and give you an evaluation of it. They generally advertise themselves as editors or literary consultants. However, f...
There are multiple citation standards. If your teacher or your school has a particular citation style they prefer or require you should consult the guides for that style. In not, one approach you c...
Just because a scene is written from a character's point of view does not mean it is written based only on information available to the character. The first responsibility of the narrative it to ma...
Well, more to the point, no agent is going to want to read a sequel to a book they don't represent because no publisher is going to want to publish a sequel to a book that they did not publish. The...
I think the Supreme Court definition applies; to paraphrase: erotica and pornography are pretty much undefinable but we know it when we see it. If you are describing the genitals or breasts of nak...
A trope is a cliché setup; of any kind, that audiences have come to expect. An example in a commercial is the great looking guy catching sight of a jaw-dropping girl, dropping everything to approa...
If you are going to have it professionally edited, do that first before you do any other steps. These days, manuscripts must be 100% print ready before submission. A query is an introductory lett...
Looks like I came up with my own approach in the end. At least, nobody seems to have mentioned it. LibreOffice Writer (and probably most other word processors) supports adding comments. They are d...
I think you are being too visual and too step-by-step; hoping to create an image / screenplay in the reader's head. But even in the movies, every second of film counts: This scene would be three li...
In terms of providing definitions for general terms, I would say that glossaries are pointless in online documentation. User can easily search for any term they do not understand. If there are te...
Although I have read a few things I liked written from the first person, I can't write that way myself; it is far too limiting and constrained. For one, the POV character has to be in every frikkin...
You might not really know what happens when you try each approach until you use both, say to tell the same short story twice. I'm currently working on the fourth book in a series, and the first on...
The term writing is kind of like the word walking, except that writing gets used as a collective term in a way that walking does not. Lots of people walk as a major part of their jobs: letter carri...
It sounds like you write much like I do, discovering the story as you go. My approach is to put notes, as I think of them, at the bottom of whatever I am writing, and carry them forward. By "note...
This is a very common technique among aspiring writers. It feels like playing tricks with the narrative line solves all kinds of writing and story problems for you. But this is largely an illusion....
Fix it now vs fix it later is a perennial question in writing. Often the answers given are absolutist one way or the other, or come down to "whatever works for you". But I would suggest a different...
No, there is no software that would automate the translation of newly written paragraphs for you This is not something you would normally do. You might think that you are "going in one straight pa...
This depends on which aspects of the war you want to look at. For your example with the child and the family in general it might be better to take the already explained path: explore the implicatio...
Delete it ruthlessly. As writers, we are often addicted to the clever phrase (or the phrase that seems clever at the time). But we succeed or fail not as crafters of phrases but at tellers of stori...
It doesn't really matter how much more experience he has than you: if he's asking you to testread, he presumably wants your opinion as a reader. And this case, he didn't provide enough detail for ...
I do it. In my current writing project, which I started some months ago, I had this image in my head that at the end of ACT I, character A was going to seek out character B for some help. The twist...
I like what you did there. Looking at the painting made it clear in the relevant paragraph that "he" was speaking. I'm a big fan of this approach myself. A whole bunch of "he said", "she said" loo...
