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Few short publications, that summarize the differences, and guide to a decision: 1) S1000D or DITA – Which Should You Use? ...A dude with 30+ years in the business of aerospace and software develo...
Anchor Yourself. I would say, adopt a discovery writing paradigm, and focus on a character. Most of my stories begin with a character that has some rare (and interesting) real-world ability. I fin...
It's hard to build a recognizable identity while genre-hopping. The more successful you are with any one style or genre, the more both readers and publishers are going to demand more of the same. ...
In many books novels or other forms of fictional writing, the reader is introduced to a so called 'chosen one'. This character or being is of higher power or in general, of different nature than ot...
There are quite a few critically acclaimed novels that feature only a single character. For example, William Golding's Pincher Martin tells of how the protagonist reaches a rock in the sea after a ...
You seem to be looking at picking a genre as signing up to follow a very tight straight-jacket on your writing. I don't believe that's what genre is at all. Rather, genre is a very loose set of rel...
You have too many characters As soon as your characters begin to resemble each other, you have more characters than you are able to deal with. It might be a problem of having more characters than...
My advice is to provide rough therapy in the book. Accompany your suicidal character with a counterweight character. This does not have to be somebody that loves them, nor does it have to be a main...
I am a discovery writer. I recommend it highly. For me, I begin with a character. All my characters have something "special" about them, something they are good at, as well as a flaw, often someth...
I have published several peer-reviewed scientific papers, also Master's Theses in two different disciplines and a long doctoral dissertation. Your proposed rule is not one I have ever followed, and...
Many professional writers and editors report that there is about a 25% loss between the first finished (!) draft and the final draft. Depending on your approach (e.g. either outlining or pantsing)...
Plot, character, and world are all an integral part of story. You don't have a story, if you don't know who lives it and where it takes place. You may not know all the details when you first have ...
There is plenty of information on how to draft characters for a single story, or characters that follow an important arc throughout a (small) number of stories. Are there any techniques for design...
Don't write characters, find characters. I'm a strong believer that open-ended stories should exist in open worlds. Rather than telling a unique and pivotal tale of daring-do they tell the story o...
I've experimented with both critique partners and people I know (be they friends, family or colleagues) as unrewarded beta readers. The latter are very slow, sometimes reading slower than I wrote a...
Fiction is never "realistic". Frodo doesn't go to the toilet even once during the months he's on the road. He must have had massive constipation at Mount Doom. The purpose of fiction is to entert...
As you noted in your answer, the common approach to doing this is to just introduce another villain, or another threat, and keep doing that as necessary. The trick is to balance it in such a way th...
That's absolutely fine. As other answers have said the concept of a fairly generic plot where the sub-stories are the real meat is very old indeed and can work very well. Especially with the rise...
You can make a story like that a "change of life" story for your MC. "Coming of age" is just one kind of change of life, there are others, they all just mean she comes to a new understanding of lif...
Some gestures are universally understood. For example: He nodded. or The audience burst in applause. Because those gestures are universally understood, giving them description or explan...
It depends on what sort of speech you tend to write. Personally, I would approach this like method acting. Write the character's script, make a sandwich, turn on a voice recorder, then read the scr...
I'm attempting to use the Snowflake method to try and get around issues I tend to have with writing. I can pump out words, tons of words; not a problem. But, at the end of the day it's a relatively...
There are more things you can do with stakes than escalate ad nauseam. First, you can vary the threat. For example, Buffy jokes more than once about "saving the world again". The difference comes ...
Videogame, in a fantasy world that isn't our world. Why not make people blue, red, green? Who says their biology and skin colours have to conform to earth's? In fact, then you'd have a number of "r...
First person serves best to help the reader identify with the character, it minimises the distance between the audience and the protagonist. Is that the kind of connection you want between the read...
