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I guess this depends on your definition of "trust", so I will offer two takes on that. First, trust is most easily earned when it is least necessary: The more open and transparent one side can be,...
You should always be mindful of why a reader is reading your book. People are reading for a reason. In the case of fiction, they are reading for pleasure. People may take pleasure in reading about ...
I think you name all the correct issues. The reader starts with no context, the setting is obscure, the reader won't be invested. And of course you don't want a cliche. On the plus side, however, ...
What's gained from NaNoWriMo? Obviously for some, motivation through a social event. For some, it is like running the marathon, not to come in first, and even if they come in last, they want t...
Is this going to muddle the hero's journey and conflict in the story? Quite the opposite - at least if he has a reason to do this Your character shouldn't join the antagonist group out of a w...
The beginning has a job to do, and the length depends upon how big the job is. The job is bigger if the Normal World is unfamiliar to the reader. The job, in essence, is to lay the cultural, physi...
This is the third question today that I am going to answer with essentially the same point, but stories are fundamentally about a choice of values. To establish the grounds for a story, you must fi...
A drama is fundamentally about values and about a choice between values that reveals who the protagonist is in their heart of hearts. The first question that a story has to answer, therefore, is on...
+1 Mark. In keeping with his description, I consider most stories to be a description of a change or transformation of a main character, and potentially other characters in the show. This is true ...
What you have done so far is to create a history. A history is fine, but it is not a story. A story is a drama and dramas have a specific shape. You can think of a drama as being built around a cho...
You are just talking about a twist ending, there is nothing wrong with it. Consider The Sixth Sense, with Bruce Willis. A wildly successful twist ending, to be sure. SPOILER ALERT In the end, ...
Don't do it. You shouldn't be doing something in writing that isn't at least tolerable. You need a different style of writing. I say that as a writer that has gone over a three page scene THIRTY ...
I think this is what separates the pros from the amateurs and the unpublished from the published. Writing is hard. Getting it right can take a huge amount of work and many writers report being roya...
Here is the data from the USA Bureau of Labor Statistics for the wages of a Proofreader, the median wage is $19.06 per hour. Their job description is: Read transcript or proof type setup to det...
Yes, but the possessor changes the MC's sensory experience so drastically from what's actually there that it would be impossible for the reader to tell what's happening in the 'real' world. ...
This is absolutely a problem with critique groups. On of the fundamental facts for 90% of critique groups is that your critique partners are not your natural readership. Most of the critiques I giv...
Do short chapters affect story progression? Perception is key Short Version: There's two kinds of story progression: how fast the plot moves forward (meaning the time it takes for one action to...
The convention is to always start a new paragraph when you change the speaker, change the place, or change the time. In this case, you're changing the speaker, so your first example is correct. In ...
You probably want those intermediate scenes to be a Montage. Either that, or indicate you are rejoining Bruce and Wayne in scene description: INT. A SINGLE SCENE - DAY CONTINUING PREVIOUS SCENE...
What distinguishes YouTube is not the number of contributors, though that is huge, and essential to its success, but the number of viewers, which is extraordinarily large. What makes a content pla...
To me, A writer's first target audience is themselves. When Stephen King was asked why he wrote horror, his reply was, "What makes you think I can write anything else?" The bulk of my fiction has ...
The safest time to take a break is between projects, I think. Taking a break in the middle of a project could kill it, there is too much of the project still in your head, held in 'working memory'....
Should you take a break from writing? Yes. Writing is, at its core, a creative process (especially where fiction is concerned). You can't force creativity. Or at least you shouldn't. If you try ...
I think the writing is fine as it is. To me, they sound like the conclusion of the reanalyzing: She was reanalyzing, and now she knows something: X cannot be true. Y should be true. In fact, "sho...
While words with multiple syllables do have an internal stress patterns, stress is more a matter of the role a word plays in a sentence. Often a writer who is sensitive to this will recast a senten...
