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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...
When writing a technical article, use the command voice in present tense and do not use ambiguous words like "very clean". Use a plain non-serif font for your article. Anything else looks non-...
This is an opinion based answer, my opinion is I would put it down pretty quickly. Anything that is made intentionally difficult to read slows me down, particularly if misspellings don't sound any ...
how to incorporate such a "straight twist" successfully, without making the story boring because of the straightness of the plot? Make your character in the second round smart, and the twist p...
My approach to this, which I stole from other authors, is to not worry about time or space and describe the action of the accident in detail, use as much space as you want. There is an actual real...
The human perceptual system runs on anticipation. We understand things that play out in predictable and foreseen ways. We are disoriented by things that happen suddenly, violently, and out of the b...
Yes, you can do this You shouldn't try to use the exact same setup, but draw clear parallels in the buildup of your second twist so that your readers will know that something should happen. But ...
A point that has not been touched on in any of the other answers: for some of your readers, English is not their first language. Such readers, if they don't know English very well, would wonder if ...
It's a balance. When readers look forward to the next book in a series, they're looking for an experience that's both new, and similar to the previous installments. That's a tough line to toe -- an...
Many media from 1920s-1977 copyright law change had DIFFERENT rules for copyright. Post 1977, works were automatically granted copyright upon creation. Before then, works HAD to be registered and...
Omit for The problem is that modulate means that something modulates something else. Your sentence reads as if you want to say that the spiritual treatment might change the patient's already healt...
You don't need to be able to build homemade explosive to describe a character who does. You just need to give the reader the impression that the character knows what he/she's up to. Most of the r...
It will have validity in the sense that if the theory is original AND you get published so your theory can be found by strangers, then somebody doing diligent research should find you as the earlie...
Unless your novel is intended for the 6-9 age bracket, explicitly telling the reader the "moral of the story" is a terrible idea. Readers of novels are not reading to be educated by your wisdom, t...
I am not a lawyer, but I do know you own the copyright on the material from the moment you finished it. Other's cannot publish it for money without your permission. Unfortunately, you need to get a...
To me, a growl sounds like a very loud and sustained clearing of the throat, or a combination of that and a shout caused by injury, as people (particularly men) may do when they hurt themselves. Su...
If I am not addressing your question about repetitiveness, clarify it and I will edit. I do see a few problems with your prose. In no particular order: 1) I don't understand the value of "urged"....
It is hard to answer from what is in your question, but scenes you feel are too short are (in my experience) under-imagined, or under-conflicted, or you are engaging in too much 'telling' about how...
I would use the first method, but underline or bold the code words, italicization is too subtle. We (the reader) are supposed to be in on the trick, so it should not be so subtle that we miss it.
I think a story can be impartial without being boring. IMO a story is boring when it lacks conflict or unresolved conflict. Readers are interested at first by interesting characters, but that won'...
I suspect that most reader expect the narrator is not going to die. But you should not look on the device of the involved narrator as requiring the maintenance of strict logic about when the story ...
I have been rejected many times with no explanation. I think sometimes, like any competition, what I wrote is just not the best of what they had to choose from at the time. They can't publish eve...
It is the lure of the fine phrase. We all want to create fine phrases, phrases that are a thing of beauty in their own right. But the lure of the fine phrase can often lead us into the verbose and ...
