Posts by System
Accidents are a part of our real life. It is possible to see an old friend accidentally. It is possible to find a fallen comet accidentally. It is possible to kill someone by an accident, etc. Many...
In many movies and novels there is a scene where the heist is planned. Bankrobbers don't usually spontaneously draw their guns when they pass a bank on their way to the supermarket. They have to ha...
Location, in a novel, is a protagonist. Protagonists act. If they are not taking part in an action, they don't appear in that section of text. If the location does not take a meaningful part in the...
There are different styles of emphasis: underlining, spacing, italics, bold face, all caps and small caps, change of font face, color etc. Some of them can be found in printed magazines, others hav...
Many of the most popular YA novels are pretty brutal, rape and murder are a common ingredient. Many show teenagers having sex. But how far can you go, before you cross the line into adult fiction, ...
The intriguing thing about magic is that you can imagine being able to do things that you cannot do in real life. But characters that can do anything are exceedingly boring. What drives a plot for...
I am German. You will soon understand why I state this up front. In German cultural theory a difference is made between so called 'serious' literature, music, painting and so on, and 'entertaining'...
I don't know about your prologue, but as a reader I seriously despise prologues that don't feature the protagonists, for two reasons: I read novels, because I am interested what happens to the pro...
In direction of one of the most famous stories of Hans Christian Andersen "The Little Match Girl", I want to write a tragedy for children; a story dealing with children who are suffering and who ma...
The other answers have shown how diplomacy can be interesting. But lets assume your question means that it is important to your plot that your characters are diplomats, but that their work as dipl...
There are many stories where characters take on false names. In the dialogue, this person goes by the fake name. In the narrative (the part of the text not directly quoted from the speech of the ch...
Chicago, MLA and APA all italicize book titles. Chicago and MLA "quote" journal articles, APA uses no markup for those. Since these reference list formatting styles are most common, I would adhere ...
I'm currently brooding over good character names for a novel I want to write. I was looking at some of the books I read recently, trying to understand why the authors picked the names they gave the...
There were a couple of other questions about this, but they were asked many years ago, so I thought I'd start a new one. For a long time, I used Wiki on a Stick to organise my worlds and allow for...
I'm looking for a software that helps me develop and organize the characters for my novel. What I want: something like a filesystem, with a file for each character it should have or allow me to ...
Neurological illnesses or a conversion disorder can cause muteness with no apparent reason. See this related question over at cogsci.stackexchange.com: https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/44...
I'm trying to create textbook-perfect iambic pentameter. I may be wrong in my assumption of there being such a thing as a 'secondary stressed syllable', but in the word 'poetry', the rhythm of it ...
I need to quote from a journal written in Arabic. What should I do? Write it first in Arabic then followed by translation and indicating that it is my own translation (translated by author)? Can I ...
I'm unsure of whether or not I should cite a foreign language source (Swedish), with the original (Swedish) title, or use a translated English language title. The paper is for university-level cour...
With requirements, shall / shall not. Nothing else. "Shall" is a very specific; it's a keyword I can search for. Must, must not, will, will not: That's for the explanatory text. (And no shalls in t...
I have been writing high school English paper on a novel in MLA format. Is there any rule about using past participle or past imperfect? Throughout the essay there have been many places that can ...
Sparingly is good. Most commonly, a pair of parentheses is useful to set off a strong or weak interruption, rather like a pair of dashes or a pair of bracketing commas. As a rule we prefer parent...
Possible Duplicate: How does one present spoken dialogue as a secondary language to signed speech? I want to write a novel and I was thinking of including a deaf character. I want to kno...
I downloaded the trial version of Scrivener and began toying with it in the fall of 2011. I initially used it for outlining, I loved the corkboard feature. I then decided to give it a try for NaNoW...
Here's my stab at brevity: I ran alone on the winter beach racing the storm home.
