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Get cozy at your local library. Before the internet, this is where we all did our research. As long as it's a well-stocked library, there should be plenty of books on the basics of explosives. U...
Honestly, I see nothing wrong with your example. It reads quite naturally to me, and feels much less intrusive than some of the alternatives suggested in other answers here. It's possible, I supp...
You can skip the "Colin smiled." line, and just imply it, using the tag. "I'm sure the other patients will appreciate that as well," Colin said, pleased. "You been to the children's ward yet?"...
The reader must want to read As far as I'm concerned, this is the basis for nearly everything you put into a novel. If the reader doesn't want to read your book, he will usually stop. Everything, ...
This seems to be an increasingly common problem and my belief is that it results from the writer consciously or unconsciously seeing the movie in his head and trying to transfer it to the page. Thu...
Writing is typically combined; there is an expository part, then an argumentative part. Expository writing can exist by itself, in encyclopedic or historical reference works (like, "here are the pr...
I don't have citations, but I've seen a couple approaches to this problem: "One possible application of (this work) would be to..." -- by casting it speculatively like that, using "would be", you...
Hang a lantern on it. If possible, I would revise your story to make the MC's transformation secret but brief, in fact you can take a chapter where the rest of the group is trying to find the MC, ...
A character study is a character portrayal, it shows the life and concerns of one (or a few) characters, why they do what they do, so you get to know them. They can be entertaining, immersing the r...
You are not overusing "it" or "its", the only thing to worry about with pronouns is ambiguous reference; which I don't see in your example. An ambiguous pronoun reference: Normally a pronoun refe...
It's not a paradox - it's a choice You, as the author and creator of your specific fictional world, have the choice to define which of these statements is true. There is no inherent reason to assu...
Tension is caused by reader's wanting to know "what happens next". The MC survives in nearly every novel, in fact the MC dies so infrequently that people don't like those novels. They assume your ...
Asimov's is one of the best-known, most-respected magazines in the SF genre. Their volume of submissions is immense (I don't know precise numbers, but e.g. F&SF very recently got 192 submissio...
You're only half right. You seem to have forgotten these people are in business to make money by selling works, so the cover letter does two things for them that have nothing to do with your story ...
Other than an explicit "disclaimer" in an author's note or something, I really don't think you can. If I buy five books set in a dystopian fantasy (I might), I will be disappointed if the sixth boo...
The difference between showing and telling, as it applies to story writing, is whether you create a scene that conveys information, or whether you state the information explicitly. So instead of ar...
Please understand that "third person limited" and its ilk are categories of analysis applied to works after the fact by those who find it entertaining to categorize everything. They are not rules t...
It is a bad idea in general for a writer to ever use a living person as a reference point. For one, people aren't famous forever, secondly, you risk people not knowing who you are talking about (so...
I don't think 4000 words is too long; not at all. I am presuming this is a 100,000 word novel, I think you have 10% (10,000 words) for something "magical" to happen. I base that on the standard Thr...
Speaking as a professor (with a PhD), I would introduce myself, to a friend of a friend, by my first name. As an aside, a saleswoman should not be introduced as "a colleague" in a university settin...
This can work. I'll even give a couple examples of boss fights that pull off this kind of pacing and feel very satisfying. But it's difficult to pull off, and there are a few things you have to get...
As a gamer, when you gear up for a battle, you want to get a battle. Mass Effect 3, for example, was criticised for not having a final boss, even though the way the story was structured there was n...
Personally, I do not find this a satisfying ending, in fact in a way, it ruins the story. The villain's character arc was completed when he died in the major battle, they should have found his body...
After The First Draft, I do several things. I often have ten drafts (of novels that run over 120,000 words). Make sure you have a separate backup of your work before you begin changing it, every t...
Cognitively, there is none! On the surface, there are stages that other answers have provided, and by all mean stick to them as a checklist to know where you are, and to be confident when others a...
