Activity for System
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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A: How to introduce alien flora/fauna without turning the fiction into a biology book? I won't repeat my answer to this related question here, but instead briefly remind you that writing about an alien world is exactly like writing about the real world. You are stuck on the idea that your readers know nothing about this alien world that you made up, but that they are intimately familia... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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How to show a brief hesitation around a word When we speak, there are often small pauses between syntactic units such as sentences. In writing, these pauses are signified by punctuation: > I can come if you want. (without pause) > > I can come, if you want. (with brief pause) > > I can come. If you want. (with longer pause) But sometimes we... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Is including a large number of twists a bad thing? Readers of popular fiction (usually) want a clear protagonist, a clear goal, and a clear path of the protagonist to that goal. Readers also want the protagonist to struggle for his goal, so that when he achieves it, this achievement will feel deserved and satisfying to the reader. The purpose of twis... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How do I gain sufficient emotional distance from my work to edit it? Different methods have been suggested for copyediting, that is, for finding spelling and grammar mistakes (such as printing text instead of copyediting at a screen, using a different font, reading backwards from the end of the text, and so on), but to my knowledge only one method helps in distancing ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Should I use the terms "people" "person" "man" and "woman" in fantasy setting? Think of how you talk about other species in reality. There are no "women" or "men" among dogs, chicken, or ants. The words "man" and "woman" specifically denote human males and females. But there are other terms that we use. We have specific names for the males and females of certain domestic and g... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How many books should writers read? There is no postmodern canon that you have to work through to be able to participate in postmodern intellectual and artistic discourse. If you want to create postmodern art (which is always at the same time theory) then that desire will drive you to follow the intertextual references in the texts you... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Where in the writing process do you work in subtext? I studied literature at university. We spent a lot of time extracting meaning from texts, and some time on understanding the process of writers. From what I learned there, I can assure you that the overwhelming amount of meaning found in literature (or any other art) is a projection on the part of th... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Is a bandit ambush a fatal, cliche mistake? As I see it, there are three possible uses for such a scene. 1. You show the skill of your protagonist because you need your reader to know it later. Just saying that your knight is skilled is not sufficient, you need to prove it. 2. Fantasy fiction isn't always as plot driven as thrillers. In som... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Do men fall "in love" (romantic, sensual or desire) with fictional characters? Can men fall in love with characters in novels? Of course they can. Men and women fall in love with fictional characters of all kind. Think of the teen girl pining after a boy group, or the teen boy pining after a Playboy centerfold. Both are "in love" with – that is, they feel romantic and sexual i... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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Writing a novel, can I do [this or that]? I want to write a novel about [something or other] and now I wonder if it is possible to do [this or that]. (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Do Epic Fantasy and Sci-Fi books have inherently more descriptive language? I agree with Standback, but his answer is not generally true. In this time and age, most readers of Fantasy and Science Fiction have seen so many Science Fiction and Fantasy movies that their minds are full of images of spaceships and dragons. You can expect the average person to be just as familiar... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How do I stop my writing sounding like a bad imitation of whatever author I've just been reading? Many authors avoid reading – or reading anything even remotely related to what they write – while they are writing, to avoid being influenced by the ideas and style of other writers. My recommendation would be to abstain from reading in your own and related genres while you write , because it is near... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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Citing a footnote I have a primary source whose editor often has editorial comments in his footnotes. There are occasions when I would like to quote these remarks, but I cannot understand how to correctly do this from my Chicago Manual. How do I do this? Also, my reference Book has two column pages and begins each fo... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: What are "good" writing habits? I'm going to answer this from a different point of view. What you ask for, and what many inexperienced artists crave, is a secret or formula they can follow to create outstanding art. They read how-to-write/draw/whatever books, ask in online forums, and live with the apprehension of never learning t... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Program for Tracking Scene Information I don't know of any software that can do this. What I have done in the past, and what I'm doing again after trying to work with Excel, is write my outline in a text document. Each chapter is a numbered section in that text document. I leave a very broad margin (half the page or more) for handwritten... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: There's an actor with my lead character's name - how big a problem is this going to be? I know how attached I can get to my character names, especially since it usually takes me weeks to come up with them (no exaggeration), but as a reader I also know how little importance character names hold for me, and I would have enjoyed the Lord of the Rings equally if it wasn't Frodo and Sam but ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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How do you avoid unnatural sounding language? I am not asking you to tell me to keep my sentences less than 20 words long because I am determined to write some really long sentences. What I want to know is how to avoid sounding unnatural. Do I have to avoid certain kinds of words, words of a certain length, etc? Is there something about the phra... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Should I follow my instinct or public demand when writing a story? There are those that claim that bestsellers cannot be made. They advise you to write the story that feels most relevant to yourself, because otherwise your writing will feel void and empty. Then there are all the professional authors and editors, whose daily work it is to make bestellers. They manag... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Will what worked 'back then' work today? (Novels) I do not see much difference in style between Goethe, Proust, or Hawthorne on the one hand, and whichever book I pick up in the bookstore today. They refer to a different world and use some different words, but if you replace horses with cars and fireplaces with central heating, and disregard the dif... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How can one not let their voice show through in all the characters? Your characters do not need to sound different. Reading current fiction, I rarely can tell the characters apart by their voice alone. That is, if you take a page of dailog and remove all references to who speaks, usually all the characters speak pretty much the same. If it is part of your writing s... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: What are the basic elements of a crime investigation story? Scanning the boldfaced terms on this page, I have to laugh aloud because it makes me imagine a novel about a crime investigation without a crime! That would be a most intriguing book indeed – and I think I will write it, right after my book without an antagonist. But to answer your question, th... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How should I "remind" the reader of something that they may have forgotten? There is no ideal way. Some readers have a good memory for detail and will be irritated that you keep reminding them of what they know they have already read. Other readers will be reading your book while distracted by WhatsApp and will not get what you try to tell them no matter how often you repea... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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How to write a utopia? I have always been an avid reader of utopian novels. Not necessarily those that advertised themselves as such, but the small utopias, of people doing good, of relationships going right, of a happiness possible in the real world. And I don't mean a happy end, but a happy continuation and a description... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: Tactics to get past getting stuck? I have done quite a lot of reading on the question of talent, and apparently what we perceive as talent is a combination of - an inborn potential to be good at a certain task (for writing: creativity, verbal intelligence); - a liking for that task (that is, enjoying the writing, not just the idea of... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How early in the narrative should I start my book? Only you know where your story begins. I'll ask you a few questions to help you figure out what you already know, deep inside: 1. What is, for you, the seed of that story? The initial core idea from which you built all of it? Sometimes it is a scene. Could that be the beginning? 2. What is the logl... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How much falling action can follow the climax? The denouement, or resolution, has many story-related purposes, many of which Wikipedia nicely summarises, but it also has a reader-related purpose: that of gently guiding the reader out of the story and back into the real world. Many of us fanboys and fangirls are very familiar with a kind of postp... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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How to deduce the protagonist's flaw from the plot? I'm working on a plot-driven novel. The plot stands, and the changes the characters undergo, that is, the character arcs have been devised. What I need now is the lack or fault that makes my characters who they are at the beginning, that are an obstacle to their goal, and that they finally overcome.... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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A: How do I avoid making all my characters speak like me? 1. Read other novels. They have dialog examples. 2. Observe people. They have dialog examples. 3. Understand your character. Imagine you are that person. Try to speak how that person would speak. Act it out at home, like an actor learning a role. Every time you write what that character would say t... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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How to convey that the main characer is in pain while dialogue is occuring I'm writing a story in first person. There's a point in the story where two characters are having a dialogue, while the narrator is listening. The problem is that the narrator is also in pain while this dialogue is occurring (think super-villain explaining their evil plan while the hero is injured). ... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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Antagonist that remains unknown In genre fiction, the antagonist is usually either known throughout the book or revealed before the end, so that protagonist and antagonist can battle it out during climax. What I am wondering is, how can a story work out, if the antagonist remains unknown? That is, the protagonist works towards his... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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MLA multiple parenthetical citation essay without page numbers I have an older source that has no pagination. My question concerns the correct mode of multiple parenthetical in-text reference to the source according to MLA style. In the works cited section: Smith, Alexander. "The Problems of Writing." New Inquiry (1940): n. pag. In text (version 1): Smith ar... (more) |
— | over 7 years ago |
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Writing Contests For Teens I am a 12 year old aspiring writer who would love to enter writing contests. I'd like to find some writing contests that are free to enter, are for people my age, and preferably, have prizes. How can I locate contests like this? How do I know which ones are worth entering? (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: What does Show don't Tell actually mean Thought verbs Chuck Palahniuk, an accomplished master of showing, suggested an exercise to learn not to tell. The exercise is to not use "thought verbs". Instead of telling the reader what a character thinks or feels, you have to show them how they behave. Palahniuk calls this "un-packing" the emoti... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How do I express that a culture has a different standard of beauty? The trick that most novels use is not to describe what is thought beautiful in that world. In most novels, when a character is supposed to be beautiful, this is simply stated, and it is up to the reader to imagine what that person looks like. In fact, in most novels you have no idea what skin color, ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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How can we revise sentences so that they remain clear and concise but gain a rhythm of a specific kind? I have written poems in iambic meter before, and they didn't seem to be wordy. And for a long time I have wanted to use metrical effects in my prose, which is called prose rhythm. But I am wondering how it can be possible to restate something that is so clear and concise in another way that has the k... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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Would employing the use of philosophical ideas in fiction without citing the sources be considered plagiarism? I am working on a fictional book which would be similar to that of Winnie-the-Pooh in terms of its format and ability to be read, but I want there to be philosophical meaning to what goes on in the book. My problem is that I will be using some fairly unique, -- or at least attributable -- ideas from ... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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AmE text for a British literary agent (and viceversa) Assume a manuscript written in AmE (if it matters, also assume an American MC). It would be relatively easy to change spelling, word choice, etc. to make a BrE manuscript. However, since I write with an AmE brain, I feel that such a change would be somewhat lacking (not to mention, I might miss some... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: How to move back to main section after finishing a sub-section This might depend on your field (or department/school/institution guidelines), but at least I simply insert the epilogue (because that's what it is) at the end of the last subsection. If your writing is coherent enough, it shows. For instance: 1. Main section ... In chapter 1 I will talk ab... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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Is protagonist identification/empathy influenced by the reader's gender? I had a discussion with someone who claimed she'd once read (though she couldn't remember the source) that men can identify and empathize with male as well as female protagonists, while women identify better with female protagonists (the claim being, they can certainly sympathize with male protagonis... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: Is it good to hate a character? It depends a lot on the plot, the "genre" (I don't like this word too much, but there is a difference between pulpy science fiction and literary fiction), and other dynamics. For genre fiction (=science fiction, horror, fantasy, detective, etc.) stereotypes are generally expected. This means, charac... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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How do you force a turning point in a narrative that is supposed to be precisely about the lack of such devices? Please, before flagging this question as subjective or generic, take a moment to read it through. IMO this is a valid, specific question, albeit a bit complex. To try and unpack the admittedly obscure title, I will use an example: Imagine you have a character who plans her life and daily activities... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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A: PhD thesis: how to visually separate the "general conclusion" chapter from the last part Each field has their own formatting habits, and each university/school/department their own. Most often, you number them separately so that you have: 1 Introduction 1.1. Aims of the Research 1.2 Theoretical Background and Primary Works ... ... 3. Aspects of Femini... (more) |
— | almost 8 years ago |
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How much does imperfect grammar put off an agent? I've written a novel and looking back the story line was good but the grammar wasn't great. I submitted the book to a few agents and received some constructive comments which I took on board. I have rewritten the story and corrected many of the errors. For instance I removed gerunds. Now that it's co... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Is using MBTI and the Jungian functions to create a character a good idea? Whether I am watching, reading, writing or telling a story, I always pay attention to internal coherence in the characters' behaviour (and of course I am not the only one). By writing and reading, I became able to understand how difficult it is to keep in mind each character's personality and histor... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Should a main character be like the reader, or better than him? As I was reading different stories, I came to wonder about what is better for the reader to identify with the character. Indeed, it is often unclear whether the MC (main character) is like the reader or better than him because he is often both. Sometimes, the MC will easily find the answer to a com... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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A: How to keep a main character nameless? There are two ways you can accomplish not giving a name to your character. 1. Since there is a reason why she isn't given a name, you can simply explain that reason to the reader (e.g. by having the characters talk about it) and have the community handle the problem of a person not having a name in ... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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The "destroy a day's work every nth day" method of improving one's writing - sensible? Consider the following technique for improving one's writing: - at the end of every nth day, rip up all your work for that day and destroy it - when you replace it, try to do something better, whether in overall conception, form, content, or all of these. I haven't tried this yet, but the idea is ... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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A: Switching from past to present tense to increase narrative speed? Changing tenses can work as an exclamation mark. Particularly in denoting a mental process. In other words, using past tense and switching to present tense for action scenes is something I wouldn't do - it's just too extensive, and it loses its meaning. Examples of what I mean by "exclamation mark" ... (more) |
— | about 8 years ago |
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Describe a main character I was wondering if you could help me with this: I'm starting to write a book, but I don't really know how to describe the physic of the main character (in 1st person). I heard some techniques like, compare the character with herself when she was young (while watching an old pic), but I don't know if ... (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |
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A: Lots of confusion over which story to write It really is up to you which you write. However, I would recommend based off of my experience writing a short story first and then if you are still feeling good about the idea try and expand it. (more) |
— | over 8 years ago |