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People from the comments dislike dream twists but I'm curious how stories like "Alice in wonderland" or "Total recall" or "Wizard of Oz" pulled those endings off. The problem with "just a drea...
From OP in comments: I turn 19 in a month. I've been writing fiction since I was about 8 or 9. I love it. I'm not in it for the money, I just want people to read my stories. I wouldn't care if ...
Six or seven is not too many on a team, for a story. The problem is making sure you can make them distinct and don't have two or more people doing basically the same job in the plot. The problem...
Terror, Cowardice, Selfishness and Greed. "Stupid" mistakes need to be understandable or the story is not satisfying. They can BE understandable if the stupidity is part of human nature: Somebody...
How much value do publishers and editors place on informative/educational content in fiction stories? No value at all. Consider a Romance; When Harry Met Sally. What did you learn there, that...
As long as both mysteries are resolved, I don't see a problem with it. +1 Ash for Columbo. Also, there was recently some miniseries on TV about a woman, a young mother. In the opening, she inexpli...
I think you mistake the meaning of "educational" in this case. "Educational" needn't be only about dry information that's related to what you're writing about. At the heart of a story, there is a m...
As people are already suggesting, you could seal away or make ineffective your antagonist in a number of way. Sure, you said the enemy can't be imprisoned, but you could find other ways to incapaci...
An archetype is a role. A stereotype is a bundle of characteristics. Thus the wizard (wise man, not necessarily magical) is an archetype character because he plays a specific role in the hero's j...
This is a complex question -- complex enough that I wrote a book about it: Every Page is Page One: Topic-based Writing for Technical Communication and the Web from XML Press (https://xmlpress.net/p...
Just break the stereotype, hard. Perhaps don't make him a professional jazz musician, make him a popular, highly skilled amateur that likes to hang out at jazz clubs, and can pitch in when needed....
The number of characters in a novel is probably not a number you can fix. The number of characters in a scene, and in an arc, however, can be significant. Essentially, each character in a scene sh...
I write when I wake up. Every morning, 365 days a year, with perhaps 2% exceptions for travel days. Even then, I have written on airplanes. I work in 90 minute cycles, for both my job and writing....
Professionals are used by the famous, and even the not-so-famous but successful. Nearly all of them. The reasons are simple; really, publishing enough books to let you be a full-time fiction write...
Remember that all stories are moral. They deal with moral conflict, both within the individual and between individuals. Questions of what it is most effective to do to address a given problem as th...
Skip the flashbacks. That IS the story. Instead of flashbacks, just consider a story (trilogy or not) that shows present-tense scenes with time-skips between chapters showing the transformation fr...
There is not really much you can do in a situation like this other than to clearly alert the reader to the situation up front. If there is no way to verify the next five actions until you have comp...
Not too lazy. Your work habits really have nothing to do with it. The question is, can you make it interesting? Providing context is difficult because it is a chicken and egg problem. No one care...
It is certainly permissible because outside of specific educational programs, there are no prohibitions on paragraph structure that would make it impermissible. That topic-sentence etc. model is si...
This site here says that the copyright for a translation of a work that is in the public domain belongs to the translator. It makes sense, if you think about it. Consider: if I translate, for exam...
I have recently had to deal with a similar issue in my own writing: modern Hebrew names too have meanings. Common names might mean 'horizon','spring', etc. Actress Gal Gadot's first name means 'wav...
+1 Galastel. Along the same lines, you can keep a "supernatural" element in the realm of science fiction by having characters refuse to acknowledge it as supernatural, and insisting (as scientists ...
My first instinct was to say "you can't" - the very essence of the science fiction genre is that things are not supernatural - they make sense within the in-universe rules, if not right from the st...
Pick up the phone and call them and say, "Hello, my name is X. I am a writer and I am researching a piece on Y for Z. I will credit you, of course." This pushes the I'm-gonna-get-my-name-in-the-pap...
Stories run on anticipation. A reader keeps reading because the anticipate that certain things are going to happen, and that we are making progress towards those things happening. By and large, the...
