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After death experience. IRL many people with stopped hearts or that have clinically died, or been very close to death, report after-death experiences. Floating above their body, hearing (and repor...
Ditch the cliché altogether. Stop talking about recovery or pain, stop any worry of the character not recovering, even if they are screaming don't let that affect the other characters. Treat it lik...
I agree with Galastel; to the point I almost did not answer! What I can add is that my main characters, perhaps like Harry Potter, have something special about them, a rare talent or natural abili...
One of the best examples that come to my mind of executing a tonal shift is Catch 22. It starts hilariously funny, mocking all the absurdities of the military. Then the same elements are revisited ...
In your first example, you allow the reader to experience, together with the character, the waiting for an answer and the wondering why nobody opens the door. Each time your character knocks, there...
I'll agree with Ash, but it depends on the situation. In this one, the events/actions are not a foregone conclusion. If your character is sawing wood or tightening a bolt or having sex or doing any...
Every genre has its own style and professional standards. There may be multiple standards for subsets of a genre as well. They don't exist to make your task difficult, even though the learning pr...
Are these many layers of misery inflicted upon innocents too much for a reader to handle? You must be careful here: the way you phrase that statement, you appear to be laying the blame on the ...
In a novel you could make a Book One vs Book Two split. This is a stronger division than a chapter and is common in longer novels. I've seen plenty that change the POV this way. It's also used f...
You might find Scrivener to be useful. Scrivener is a writing program which allows you a lot of control: organization, nesting files inside folders inside folders, tags, summaries, highlights, link...
If you're setting your story after an apocalypse, readers are likely to be curious what happened. If your setting is several centuries post-apocalypse, it's not unreasonable that nobody would know,...
The only way to become a better writer is to write. Yes, you can take classes and read and study, and those things will help, but only if you do them in conjunction with writing. What should you ...
While a great many people speak English as a second language, and can thus enjoy reading a novel in English, the majority of people for whom English is the native language live in the US and the UK...
There are three possibilities: Your contract addresses this issue. Follow it. If you're not sure, ask a lawyer. Your contract does not address this issue. Go ask for permission. You somehow wr...
From my limited experience with attempts at writing verse, your starting point is what it is you actually want to say. A poem is not a random jumble of words that rhyme - it is a picture or an idea...
We remember them. A common refrain in Jewish memorials. The idea that a person's existence counted and we will remember the person and focus on that. Say her name. Say his name. A modern, secu...
The advantages are not losing a large proportion of your audience, and not being accused of being a racist, a liar, a hater, a bigot, an ignorant writer, etc. If you use a real country, there will...
Focus on the whatever was special about the group, and make your line at the end, They loved and were loved, and shall not be forgotten. It was a "policy" of my parents to speak often of the ...
It depends on the larger context. I've read your example over and over and don't find it confusing. But the word "therefore" is odd. It implies that there's already a discussion immediately be...
Let me start with an example: It's the waiting that was the worst. The attack would come, they just didn't know when. Could be another minute. Could be another hour. Ben sat nearby, sharpening ...
To a large extent this is will be dependent upon the taste of the person reading - so you have to work out who your target audience is and how you're trying to make them feel. There's nothing wrong...
Something nobody has yet mentioned: you might want to write your story as a tribute to another work. For example, Neil Gaiman's A Study in Emerald is a tribute to Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes sto...
You as an author must be aware of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, and other issues that exist in the real world. You as a person need to be aware. How (or if) you depict these th...
I don't think you need to, and I don't include it. Racism is learned, and often by association with something not caused at all by race (like poverty, and poverty that leads to crime). Studying r...
There is more than one way racism can be present in a work. For example, when Star Trek have on the bridge of the Enterprise an Asian pilot, a Russian navigator and a black Communications Officer,...
