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Building on what was said by Sara Costa, perhaps there is a secondary moral to your story. A person can live a moral, self-respecting life independent of their culture. We who see ourselves as enli...
How does love work? It's strange. It needs attraction, it has chemistry and most certainly, it does not care who is friend or foe. The mere fact that they fall in love is not a problem. The real q...
The same reason people in real life go by different names in different contexts. A doctor might go by Dr. Grey with her patients and subbourdinates, Dr. G to very young patients, Merridith to frie...
This is not a copyright issue. Summary: I am not a lawyer, of course. You can't violate copyright just by using a word, name, title, or other short phrase that somebody else used. A different in...
Orson Scott Card described 4 types of story he called M.I.C.E. The goal is not to exclusively write 1 type of story, but to be aware which type your story is, and then work to include some of the o...
TLDR: She gets on the wrong train and through her actions it stops. As she discovers it's the wrong train, it turns out that the right train has come down the tracks behind it and must stop. [Here...
If you want to be really famous you only have to click here. "you only have to click here" - you can remove that. Your audience knows how the internet works. They know that in order to receiv...
Stripped of all the self-aware, meta jargon, the problem is that your hero isn't well suited to a big, action-packed showdown --she's more likely to win with her wits than her fists. Given that, I...
She could first. Buy a ticket Steal a ticket Forge a ticket Get a ticket under another name. If its a steam engine, get on while its refueling water. After that it depends what she is after. A...
Make the railroad do the heavy lifting This will sound weird, but the "train heist" tropes you are talking about are predicated on assumptions that are rather inconsistent with how railroads move ...
I suppose I can mention a year, but that would make the work dated the moment the year passes. I don't think it's really possible to do it without making reference to some time period. I would...
Yes, non-English-speaking characters can use English wordplay. For example, none of the people in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar are really speaking English, yet there is no problem that there are pu...
A speaker of a foreign language can create a pun, or some sort of oddly constructed phrase in the reader's language by mistake. In Phillip K. Dick's novel, "The Man in the High Castle," a Japanese...
Can non-English-speaking characters use wordplay specific to English? Assuming the question is from the perspective of a writer, rather than of a reviewer or teacher, the answer is that it's a...
The main distinction to be made here is between character-driven stories and plot-driven stories. Character-driven stories, as you can imagine, focus mainly on the characters, their struggles, th...
Don't touch the train itself This might not be what you're looking for, but something to consider anyway. Remember that a train isn't an autonomous vehicle controlled by the driver alone. So hav...
No, characters aren't interchangeable. If they are, nobody wants to read it. The plot happens to the characters, and people read to identify with the characters, as people, and they develop feelin...
You have your main path already, which is a good start. What I would do from there is identify the main choices that the protagonist makes - the things they say or do that drive the plot in that sp...
There is a bunch of creative methods - some more than other - that can help you. Here are my ideas: Change the narration style One of the most clear ways to signal that something has changed is...
It's OK to start with characters who are not yet fully fleshed out, because characters tend to develop as you write. one thing to keep in mind is that your characters should have goals at the outse...
Don't detach yourself emotionally from the character. Rather, experience the character's death as a major part of their arc. This is not a real person who is gone once dead; this is a fictional ch...
I think this may be a matter of opinion; different psychologies will answer differently. Personally, my characters feel real to me; but I remind myself of a few things. I go back over what I wrote...
If you want to show people it's a war game, maybe you play out combat situations, roll dice to see who gets shot and who lives and dies based on the situation and whose number comes up. Literature...
Yes, you should absolutely care about the story, and the gameplay as well, because those are what will keep people actually comming back. Art (and music) should always be secondary to making the g...
Do it for the sake of storytelling If you're asking yourself "should I bother", then you're not thinking of it as a passion project, like an artist would, but you're thinking of it as a way to mak...
