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I'm working on a story which is focused on the conditions of its world and its society and I want to tell the story of its people as a collective, the problems they create and have together and the...
Like @Rasdashan, I am a discovery writer. My characters take shape as I write. You might find that this approach works for you too. That said, since you wish to write about a group of characters, ...
API stands for "application programming interface". API documentation is addressed to programmers who will use that interface to accomplish some task. While all technical writing is addressed to ...
Almost every ending to a romance is cliche An ending needs to provide closure for your characters. Whatever their motivation or journey through the novel is, at the end they need an ending. When w...
I've started a writing blog (specifically for research and other information about my novel in progress) with Wordpress and am having a very difficult time with categorization. In other blogs I've...
Many publishers set their own standards for justification and the choice may not be up to you. On top of that many books are simply justified. As time passes on your work may end up on different pl...
I am much like you in my process in that I see my characters’ persona but not their appearance unless it is important. I mention my MC’s height, his eye colour as that has bearing later on and tha...
I decided to give a try to the snowflake method. The idea is that you gradually expand the story from a blurb into a full draft. This question stems from the character-characterization step, but it...
I think an abstract goal needs to be more useful as a life philosophy than you can make "vengeance." If that is my life goal, what do I do on idle Sundays, ask neighbors if I can take some vengeanc...
I suggest breaking the story into smaller scenes which you approach individually one at a time. Make each scene a connection between the characters that grows slowly over time, each scene bringing ...
The example you give in your question is all about age and gender. And age is the one category you need to be mindful of while you write. Most people know in advance the age group they are writin...
Another approach, from music: perhaps the Repeat Sign from music can be an inspiration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeat_sign My transcribed knitting patterns look like this: Sl1, k1, YO...
Your example doesn't look ugly, it's just something that ought to be saved for dialogue. I wouldn't use it in non-fiction, for example. Another method is to italicize the word. This example i...
I was recently updating some of my Stack Exchange profiles and I remembered how much I hate writing about myself. It isn't just Stack Exchange profiles either. It's resume cover letters. It's colle...
You don't have to put the homicide into Chapter 1, but you might want to. While this approach is a well-worn cliche of police procedurals, especially series (in which the protagonist is known in ad...
It's not easy, but the core answer is: You need to learn the market. Being from outside the U.S., or not having an existing platform, might be issues, but they shouldn't be dealbreakers -- lots of...
Creepy normally scare people away. Maybe its just their eyes that are an issue not counted as murderous but just don't look straight into them. As someone who has a family trait of both resting bit...
Arguably this might belong in worldbuilding.stackexchange.com, but the question has to do with a fiction story and its relation to other fiction in the real world. I have a plot which involves an ...
I have floundered a bit on my second novel and finally realized I did not have a central heartstring, a big question. I had the 'good guy' and the goals; I had antagonizing forces, but no big quest...
Being given a prompt makes me freeze up immediately. Let me clarify. I'm talking about high school writing prompts. You know. Those. The ones that ask you to write an essay about what you would c...
If you're feeling spiteful or subversive, you could try genie-twisting the prompt to write something that technically satisfies the prompt, but in an unconventional or unexpected way. Example by m...
I am working with an author, whose approach is to write her text, approximately divided by indicators where she wants the breaks to be, with the idea that later she and I would improve the breaks a...
One approach to this is what I would call a "family first" story; it is a product of our familial and tribal instincts. The idea is that group loyalty trumps all law and morality. The "group" can b...
I'm going to focus on one single point: self-doubt. I suffer from self-doubt a lot, so I have come across a strategy to control it. What if I am really not that good, what if I am simply an acu...
In most of the books that i have read, which include a drunken character at some point, the person's speech mostly follows these points- Words which have two or more than two consonants continuo...
