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As a discovery writer myself, I do not "plot", but I always write with an ending in mind. I do not WRITE the ending, but I have notes on how the story can be resolved, and I make sure my story will...
There's more you can do with a trope than play it straight or subvert it. You can play with it in various ways: invert it (which you did), parody it, lampshade it, exploit it, and much much more. A...
One approach to this I encountered in the novels "A Series of Unforunate Events" by Lemony Snicket (which were definitely intended mainly for a teenage audience) is to use big words as an example t...
In my fantasy story that I'm slowly getting into, my MC Sirena is an apprentice witch. Her two fellow apprentices, Aster and Keeva, study alongside her under their High Priestess, and they all som...
Some background. Erotica, as a genre, means that mind-blowing sex is the point of the story. If you take away the sex and the story just isn't interesting, or no longer has a point, then it's eroti...
Is there any way to do this without alienating the reader, who may well have invested significant time in the previous part of the story and feel cheated as a result? No. This violates common ...
The answer is: Yes , you can do it, and you can even do it well if you try hard and if you follow some basic "rules". Details below: So, your story seems to need the kind of plot where the main ch...
I DON'T think it is okay to introduce a second POV in what is basically the third act and approach to the climax of the story. I think that will throw readers. But the solution, as you are wonding...
You just have to consider (or decide) on the level of expertise of your audience. One technique is to write to your slightly-younger self; assume the audience knows as much as you did before you e...
Sympathizing with the killer. Isn't that the entire basis of any revenge story? You stole John Wick's car? You killed John Wick's dog? And the way I understood the movies is, you are supposed t...
I'm currently writing a story taking place in the recent past in which (aside from the main plot) my characters get to spend some time in a big city. They end up visiting the tourist joints but als...
If you are trying to minimize the number of words, it will help a lot if you stick to the old rule, Show, don't tell — Wikipedia (a good rule to follow even if you aren't trying to save words). Te...
Fantasy isn't defined only by magic. I was a fan of fantasy literature for many years before coming across anyone trying to define "fantasy" as "stuff involving magic", which I've never really und...
Is "my" and "me" prohibited? I stood up and began to walk across the room. She turned away at my approach. My urge was to comfort her. Standing up and walking across the room, she turned a...
If you think of yourself as reading a novel, rather than a scientific paper, it becomes very clear. If a novel started with 'In this novel, you will read..' you might find it awkward, or at least ...
While the other answers already mention tools to create graphical presentations of your tables / columns and ways to add short information to that, for example by creating an HTML table with an emp...
The "Why" is that we want the MC (Main Character, or Main Crew) to undergo some sort of struggle in order to get from the end of the Act I to the beginning of Act III. Because that is what makes th...
I've reviewed the updated CoC, and overall it looks pretty good. I like the basic and short approach, and I like it being based on common sense and sound logic. I feel it's what every CoC should st...
I believe the most interesting (and most efficient) way to learning a new language is to avoid translating to the readers first language (I'll assume English) as much as possible. Avoid: Written...
I don't like reading made up languages, I'm going to skip over them anyway. So I seldom write more than a word. My approach is to keep the POV character thinking and analyzing what she can, which ...
I don't have a lot of respect for the three-act structure for exactly the reason you've run into: It doesn't get you any mileage out of the second act. In fact, I'm going to go further than that: T...
It's really important to understand that "diversity" isn't something you should be scoring along a single axis. It would certainly simplify things if you could tally up Diversity Points in your sto...
It is good to have specific details that mean something to the viewpoint character. She listened to the music of LILLAHI birds, and it made her calm, perhaps because lillahi birds used to sing o...
Based on your example, it sounds like you're looking for stakes in the form of "If (protagonist) doesn't help these people who need help, then (something bad) will happen." You want stakes in the f...
Your protagonist's description reminds me of Violet Baudelaire in the opening chapters of A Series of Unfortunate Events. She was an inventor, and she was well drawn. Which is to say, she had ea...
