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This is a great example of when to show instead of telling. Infodumping is the act of telling a lot of information in a short amount of time. Sometimes it works, but usually, as you have noted, the...
One solution that usually works is to write when you wake up, when nothing has happened in the day. I write for two hours every morning. My alarm is set for 4:30 AM, I am at the keyboard by 5:00 AM...
You can also tell about such features by having a walk-on character with a deformity or amputation. I have met at least four people missing one or more fingers, or with a half finger. Check out thi...
Stories are asynchronous. There is no particular connection between story time and calendar time. The length of a story is determined by the complexity of its action and the depth of its detail, no...
Flash fiction gives you very little leeway. 100 words won't allow for extended plot, character development, scene-setting... really, it's enough for one scene. I've seen people pull off more in t...
Although I have heard a few success stories, I think self-publishing is a mistake. The obvious benefits of a professional editor are lost, that includes your work not straying into copyright infri...
I don't think this balance matters terribly much. The more critical measure is whether there is tension due to conflict. If your narration is describing a battle, for example, it can go on for pa...
First, what happened two to three years ago? What happened in the months after the last story you wrote? You don't have to tell me, this is for yourself to contemplate, and I am not soliciting any...
Lean into it. Don't treat it as shocking -- a reader too scandalized by your subject matter probably shouldn't be reading this book to begin with. Instead, use all the tools of worldbuilding and ...
I would write it as dialogue, but avoid (as the narrator and writer) attributing any emotions, humor, or subtlety to the character's text messages. Annie does not say things cautiously, angrily, or...
If a character speaks, you must have it as dialogue. The normal course of action in scripts is to omit "nicety" dialogue and leave that up to the director. We typically eliminate greetings and "how...
Describe them once, as that character's standard approach, or usual caution, or something similar to that, a specific word or few words that identifies this whole thing that will be repeated often....
There is no universal convention for this, and thus no "proper" way to do it. But I would question is editing an existing blog post is the right way to do this at all. A blog is a "web log". That i...
I do want to practice swearing like a 1950s scifi hero. "By all the moons of Jupiter!" "Lunar Landings, Pop! It looks like you need some help!" "What the space is going on here?" Real words, si...
In one of my stories, I have a letter written by a girl's adoptive father. She loves him, he is pushing 80, but he tells her he is dying, along with other information he thinks she should know abou...
I don't think I seen a closeup on a document in any movie made since the 40s. It simply isn't done that way. The way it is done if for the character to be handed the document, open it, and immediat...
It does not sound to me like you are trying to be an entertaining author, it sounds to me like you want to blog and have decided the only way you can be heard and get paid for expressing your opini...
Google "how long does copyright last", you will get the terms for most countries in the results. In the USA, here is a link that summarizes it: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/faqs/copyright...
Any character present throughout the story should have some sort of good reason to be there, especially a character like you describe that will clearly be risking their life and conscience in escal...
Find the city, neighborhood, and street you want. Make up a number that is not ON that street. For example, pick an address that is between two existing addresses: On each side of my street, numeri...
I'd suggest a prank gone wrong. In real life, literally playing with matches or starting a prank fire has caused apartment buildings to burn down and kill several people. Maya can know Bob was pr...
As you said yourself, that kind of cliched dying monologue just isn't taken seriously anymore. I can't even take the big dramatic slow-motion "NOOOOOOO"s seriously anymore (see: Wonder Woman). So i...
This is one of those instances where figuring out how to show is simply too tedious and detracts too much. It is far easier and far better to simply tell. The first thing to realize is that there...
"Use the present tenses when discussing events in literary works" I don't know where you got this from, but it is not true. The default for stories is to tell them in the past tense, or to be more ...
Bollocks. (That's a technical term.) The semicolon is the correct punctuation for a particular kind of sentence structure. So on the face of it, if you want to outlaw something, it should be that s...