Posts by System
Protagonist-Centred Morality is when a fictional work is eager to point out when an antagonist does something immoral or distasteful but fails to acknowledge when a protagonist does the same or som...
A good trick that I use is to write the events on index cards. Just a quick summary of the things that happen. Then you can visually arrange them in an order that suits. I used to stick a post-it o...
There isn't a theater SE so this seems like the best place to ask, but feel free to suggest a better place. I'm producing a community play with a character who's believed to be dead, but turns out ...
In my trilogy, the protagonist and deuteragonist share a mental link, allowing them to communicate with each other telepathically. A side effect of this telepathy is that they enable the duo to obs...
Deliberate Values Dissonance is when the morals of a character or culture in-story (whether historical or fictional) that modern people don't agree with are presented in-universe. Not because the a...
You have too many characters As soon as your characters begin to resemble each other, you have more characters than you are able to deal with. It might be a problem of having more characters than...
Write for a large market segment. Write better than most of the other works out there. "Better" here means that you must write exactly what your readers want. In this sense Shades of Grey is a pe...
There are quite a few critically acclaimed novels that feature only a single character. For example, William Golding's Pincher Martin tells of how the protagonist reaches a rock in the sea after a ...
My trilogy features an otherworldly monstrosity called Fenrisúlfr as it's primary antagonist, whose characterisation takes cues from Nyarlathotep, Sauron, Showa!King Ghidorah, Sutekh, Makuta Terida...
A good solution is to clearly show how the flaws are an obstacle for the character when they try to achieve their goals. For example, if the girl in your story manages to seduce the boy who is in ...
The real question here is: How often does it matter to the character where he is? If, as in your story, your character leaves his coat behind and wanders the streets in winter, he will probably f...
One of the central characters in my novel, at the back of my mind looks like Benedict Cumberbatch. So while writing the story I have explicitly written that he looks like Benedict. It was also help...
What are different ways I can write a dialogue where a character is introducing himself to a woman in a professional setting? I don't want to write explicitly like this, "Hello Miss Emily, my ...
If your book truly needs to be this long, then it needs to be this long. Destroying your book by cutting it etc. will only diminish its quality and make it less publishable. If your book is truly ...
While writing a novel which is a story told of what happened in the past, I am facing two different ways to present information. For an e.g., I can write the story in the following two different ...
What I do: immediately make essential changes that affect later chapters If I just write on, I will have to revise even more, than if I go back now and rewrite the first chapters, before I conti...
This is my first attempt at writing a novel and I am learning in the process. So my story is about a girl who is having an ordinary life with any standards and then she gets divorced and learns m...
Few short publications, that summarize the differences, and guide to a decision: 1) S1000D or DITA – Which Should You Use? ...A dude with 30+ years in the business of aerospace and software develo...
The disappearances you gave as examples where very likely not unexplainable from the perspective of the disappeared people. They just seem inexplicable a few hundred years after the fact. Similarl...
A while ago, I asked if there any possible way for my series to avoid causing Darkness Induced Audience Apathy. A well thought-out response stated that unless I give my readers a reason to care abo...
In a technical tutorial it is helpful for a user to be able to check their progress often. Veryfing that the steps have produced a result is good because the user: has a feeling of progress can c...
I am the editor of a small college magazine. In an article that was recently submitted to me, as part of the story, the author named two people who ragged him (harassed him). I have sufficient proo...
WARNING: MULTIPLE TV TROPES LINKS In my three-part series, The Ragnarǫk Cycle I plan having my protagonist and deuteragonist to undergo a character arc. The protagonist, Joseph Norton to put it l...
My trilogy features two important characters whose identities I wish to keep hidden. The first is the series' deuteragonist, who is heavily implied to be Jeanne d'Arc (yes, THAT Jeanne d'Arc), who ...
Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy is when the audience is put off by the incredibly dark nature of a fictional work and won't care what happens next, lose interest or want all the characters to die ...
