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Unless your game is for young children who might find reading harder, you want game instructions to appear in text rather than voice-over. The reason for this is that players often change key-bindi...
Generally, do not start with a pronoun. Start with a MC name. Other than that, sure, open with "Jack ran, [Why Jack is running, something about the scene]." On the first page readers are forgiving...
The MacGuffin is bound with the plot - it can't be any random thing not related in any way to the plot around it. Consider some examples: The Hobbit: Thorin wants to find the Arkenstone, a partic...
Horses are very much like ramped up dogs; the long face, the legs. They have hooves instead of paws. You have to add on manes and hairy tails. But if somebody has seen large dogs, like a Labrador R...
I thought the point of the MacGuffin is to force the characters into a journey, so they can be transformed by the journey, whether they get the MacGuffin or not. A clear example of this is Doroth...
'British' is a rather broad definition. What place in Britain? What time period? What class? Cockney sounds very different from Received Pronunciation, someone from Yorkshire would sound very diffe...
Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series addresses this issue in an interesting way. The main character, male, single, and in his late twenties in the start of the series, very much notices the looks of ...
One alternative is to let him indulge in sex without love or romance. Especially in modern times, there are at least some women that want the same; there are apps for that. for example the vast ma...
I'll take a different tack on this. Read My Answer here that goes into the Three Act Structure in some detail. Basically, you increase erotic tension the same way you increase any story tension: ...
We don't have enough information to determine if they are "too bland". I will answer generally. I think you are paying too much attention to physical identity and color, neither of which are gener...
Do it exactly the same way the company does it. If you know what job to apply for, it's because you saw it in an ad, on their website, or in another listing. The hyphen and the slash are used d...
In academic writing, this is appropriate. You don't want to do an entire paper like this but, yeah, those individual references are important. If this was a news article you could say: Goodma...
It's extremely important for media to depict people out of the gender/sexuality mainstream as normal. So your best bet is to do exactly that: have a diversity of characters and show it all as perf...
The answer is research, research, and more research. I'm not an expert on horseback riding, or sword-fighting, or ruling a country. The only way I can write convincingly about those subjects is by ...
The game Dragon Age - Inquisition did this recently, quite successfully, with a side character, Krem. Krem is the second-in-command of a mercenary group one of your companions leads, so an NPC you ...
Beta readers can be helpful in a variety of ways. They will of course help you with the content of your work. But if you have other elements in place, include them too. For example, try to set a...
The only solution I see is to let her start critiquing your novels from chapter 1; as you guys critique hers. You can warn her your chapter 1 has been through a critique already; but she may have ...
Just do the math. Although it varies by genre, from about 80,000 to 120,000 (epic fantasy with lots of world-building), 1000 a day means 80 to 120 days. So about three or four months for a first dr...
There are many factors that would affect whether 1000 words a day is realistic for you or not. E.g.: Do you do overtime? How long is your commute to/from work? Can you use the commute time for ...
I am not a lawyer, and you should consult a lawyer before you start naming your competitor's brands and products in any publication. It probably isn't worth it; especially if they are bigger than y...
General truths, such as "the earth is round" should be in present tense. Applying the past tense to such a statement would imply that the statement is not universally true, or might no longer be tr...
I find it odd and unusual for a world to be inhabited by sentient beings where no one ever mentions or relates to religion. But it is completely fine for your characters to be atheists or just not...
You're looking at this from the wrong side. Your goal isn't to include or to represent. Your goal is to tell a story. The story should contain all the elements that it requires, and nothing but the...
Yes, if the narrator is in the present telling a story about the past. The narrative is telling a story about something that has already happened. So it's in past tense. But then the narrative p...
It All Depends on the POV. I would use ZERO footnotes in a fictional novel. I think it may have been done, but I think it breaks the reader's reverie and immersion in the story. It is bad form. Th...
