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I think this is a false dichotomy. Art is a form of communication. It fails if it does not communicate. We hear a lot of talk about "expressing yourself" but that is hollow unless you are expressin...
You have to make a distinction between plagiarism and familiar ground. Writers cover familiar ground all the time. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back. It is familiar ground. It is n...
Why are clichés discouraged in fiction writing? Neurology. The first time someone said or wrote, "Why isn't anybody talking about the elephant in the room?" it was a surprising metaphor, and ...
"Avoid Clichés" is a guideline, not a rule It would be a mistake to understand that any use of any cliché is "wrong," as you humorously do in your question. Clichés have certain problems (and cer...
Algorithms cannot detect plagiarism. They can detect a similarity between two text which might or might not be a sign of plagiarism. Plagiarism is passing someone else's work off as your own. You c...
I am not a lawyer, but in general words are copyrighted; ideas are not. The context doesn't really matter too much, if the words are unique and convey the same idea for a different topic (which the...
I would avoid the "fact based" small talk (where are you from, what's your job, etc). I would not even tell about it, unless it is critical to the plot. I'd just dismiss that as five minutes of awk...
Sentence fragments are okay, dialogue does not have to be grammatical (it would likely be unrealistic except for a grammarian; few people speak grammatically correct sentences all the time). What...
How a time change is indicated in the finished film is up to the director. You just need to indicate to the director that the time has changed, not specify how this is shown.
The fact that it is used by several entities makes it public domain, if that is what you are worried about. There is nobody that "owns" the acronym if it is used by many independent entities. +1 t...
It is just EXT. BRETT'S HOUSE - DAY You are over thinking it. It doesn't make a difference if he owns it, rents it, whatever. He lives there. Nobody gets confused. Who cares if he owns it or not? ...
That first story is long lost in the mists of time. Indeed, it could reasonably argued that it is the first and universal story. In a very real sense, this is the story written in the human heart, ...
It is the difference between being told something is true, and experiencing that same something. IRL, suppose I tell you my ten year old niece Katy is a piano prodigy. You feel one way about that,...
You can make the guide a computerized teacher or companion; which can be any size convenient to your story: very small (a patch on the skin) or a robot as large as a person. The value of using a ...
As a native English speaker and writer, I do not find this logical because the word pairings are not antonyms (opposites) or related. "from this world to eternity" does not make sense to me as a t...
There are two methods by which you can make the death of a relatively obsolete background character sad and meaningful. There is one thing you have to watch out for though: Cannon Fodder This mi...
+1 Thomas. Another trait that works in film: Make the BG character a young and attractive adult female. It exploits an unfortunate trait of human psychology, we subconsciously value young and attra...
A lighthearted story is generally one where the consequences of failure are mostly the status quo. The MC isn't going to die or go bankrupt if they fail. They must have something at stake (money pe...
You are correct, a new speaker is capitalized. It's a new sentence, and the first letter of a new sentence is always capitalized. Period. When you say it is continuing the same sentence - it's a ...
I think the heart of your difficulty is that you are equating light hearted with not serious ("fluff"). Your intuition that it is easier to write dark than light is correct, at least in the sense t...
On the old typewriters, there was no ! key. To create an exclamation mark you had to type a single quote, backspace, and type a period. That was a good system. Exclamation marks should be hard to t...
Your subtext2 is what is generally called foreshadowing. That is, it hints at something important that is yet to be revealed: the clouds on the horizon that hint at rain. It is not really a form of...
The great privilege of the novelist is that you can choose what sources of interest you create in your novel. Novels today tend to be dialogue heavy, partly in response to "Show don't Tell" and par...
Stories create experiences. Stories that are heavy on setting create an experience of that setting. People sometimes simply receive an experience for what it is. We are experience junkies. Stories ...
I think the word "setting" is too broad for what you are talking about; in both your examples, Star Wars and Hunger Games, the specific component of "setting" that you are referring to is the cultu...
