Search
+1 Secespitus; I have little to add but to talk on writing mechanics. Game of Thrones is a saga, a long-format story with many main characters so the writers (7, led by George RR Martin) have ple...
I'm a discovery writer; meaning I write without a plot, and see what happens. I don't have written character histories, or back stories, or a laundry list of traits or descriptions. If I need a phy...
There's this device that I'm writing about which can be used to transform objects. It can transform anything into anything. This is in the fictional future where people learned to modify our real...
To transition to screenwriter from a novelist you need to: Master screenplay format, which is very strict and standardized Learn to approach writing as a collaboration, not a solo activity. ...
Death as a person is commonly known to any reader of the "Discworld" series from Terry Pratchett. Also death appears in the series "Supernatural" as one of the apocalyptic riders. Another approach ...
I've been reading Stephen King's On Writing and he's got quite a lot to say about the redraft phase. He explains his working method. Write with the door closed, just for him and create a 1st draf...
You're worried that your own work is similar enough to a popular take on the genre, but substantially different from it -- so readers might be coming to it with the wrong expectations. That's a ve...
I would say, in plain English, a "method" is an approach to accomplishing something without any guarantee of success. An "algorithm" implies greater accuracy, dealing with well-defined and consist...
Powered armour of some description is a boon to any author who doesn't want to kill off characters, the armour can take debilitating damage without ever harming the occupant making it easy to put c...
Who are the readers of your magazine? The students? Imagine then, that you get a subscription to some journal. However, instead of providing you with carefully selected, edited and reviewed conten...
I would chalk this up to common human nature, and F&SF and Clarkesworld as uncommon expertise and/or resources. On the common side, without being pejorative, what is not punished (financially...
I've recently been working on some stories written in the first person from the point of view of what, in the grand scheme of things, would be called minor characters. Examples include a junior bri...
WARNING: MULTIPLE TV TROPES LINKS In my three-part series, The Ragnarǫk Cycle I plan having my protagonist and deuteragonist to undergo a character arc. The protagonist, Joseph Norton to put it l...
Put it in Neutral. As if YOU did not write the paper, but must describe the action line by line. An example from your first linked example: I will also try to show that the unrelaxed differenc...
This is unlike the question How to write good erotic scene?, which refers to a sub-plot of a novel in which two characters had sex. There the accepted answer essentially evades any detailed descrip...
I use two approaches: First, like @ggx, I steer clear of metaphors and similes in describing anything about the physical parts. The characters think and use the words they are accustomed to using a...
If you don't want people rioting in the streets you should show how people are rioting in the streets in your novel - and how that way utterly fails to achieve what the people wanted to achieve. ...
Edit 3 - Even though this is the third edit I feel it has to be included here at the top. My question as it stands is based on the assumption that reader interest does not exist in plots without co...
IMO it is the job of the author to guide the imagination of the reader, not force the imagination of the reader too specifically. So some details are important, but a blow by blow is seldom necessa...
As other answers have suggested a large character count is ok, if you manage them correctly. Building on the Tolkien idea in Galastel's answer I want to add that The Silmarillion has an unbelievab...
I am a research scientist, and I have worked on teams ranging from two (I suppose the smallest group that could be called a team, although I have done solo research as well), to fifty six, if you i...
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...
A feature of modern SF and fantasy is that readers are expected to tolerate not knowing the details of the world at the start, and to pick up these details as they go along. Instead of an info-dump...
Topic-based authoring is actually a particular form of Modular authoring. Modular authoring is most common in technical works but refers to any writing practice where-in different authors are given...
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...
