Posts by System
I like to compare writing to other jobs: Chef in a Restaurant: Should you serve your customers what they like to eat, or should you cook what you like and eat it yourself? Architect: Should you b...
Sorry, I don't have answers for you, only more questions and a few thoughts: I think it doesn't have to be a waste of time, it can still be a really cool story - Game of Thrones was a hit TV serie...
Before you read this answer, understand that this is written not so much as a writer, but as a reader with knowledge of mental health issues, both professionally and personally. Take the exampl...
You are writing a novel, and @Galastel's second example explains how you may use conventional dialogue tags to label the different speakers of different parts of song lyrics. In poetry, commonly t...
Anything goes. Musicians often use unconventional pseudonyms, from Royce da 5′9″ to , but sometimes writers use uncommon punctuation or orthography as well. There's a German crime author who publ...
My legal name is Barbara but I have gone by Babs since I was in the 4th grade. I have written a children's book and wanted to list my name as Barbara (Babs) but my editor said that it might not ap...
How do you learn anything? By practicing it. And no, you don't learn to write by reading. That is a huge misconception. By reading you acquire knowledge about how stories work. And if you read "wi...
You portray the mood-swings of a character with BPD believably in the same way that you portray any other emotion of any other character believably – by motivating the emotions. The mood-swings o...
I disagree with @Galastel. Not every character needs a backstory. Many minor characters in fiction only need to appear consistent with their context and the purpose they have in the narrative. Whe...
These days, anything could "come off to somebody as somehow sexist", but I don't see a clear path from one to the other. Specifically, a story with a predominantly female cast would not, by that f...
What I do in similar cases is write both variants – you will very likely have a clear feeling for which variant works best.
TL;DR: Try submitting with a female pen name. If the criticism goes away, there's your answer. This is your character and you need not bow to anybody's tropes or nuances, or notions of how or why...
The best writing is one that uses typographic markup sparingly. There are some agents and publishers who prefer manuscripts to be submitted in plain text! If your writing relies on italics, boldfac...
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 ...
Two things first: Take into account that you might be wrong in your assessment. Others (e.g. publishers) might view this text differently. So emphasize that this is your personal view. Limiting y...
Whenever I go to a bookstore, they either do not have any poetry books at all, or only a very small selection of classics shelved alongside Homer and Shakespeare. When you search "market for poetr...
The publishing industry has become extremely competitive in recent years. The effect is that publishers only invest money in extensive editing and revising if they are absolutely sure that the book...
I'm a big fan of ongoing stories and longer series. But one thing I've noticed about my writing (and a lot of the works I read/watch) is that as a story goes on, the tone gets progressively darker...
What I would do: Allow yourself to put your writing (as you have done it until today) on hold for a year or so. Use this time to try to approach writing differently. First, take a month or so to ...
The villain doesn't need to convince the protagonist as much as you need to convince the reader. If you can make it believeable to the reader that the protagonist changes sides, then it will be a...
You could look at how children perceive animals that they do not yet know. What they do is subsume animals that look alike into the same category. At first every animal is called a "dog" (if a dog ...
I would say focus more on character. "He's saved the world. He's saved the universe! But can he save his deepest friendship after _____?" This could also be a backstory vehicle, but leave the b...
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...
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...
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...
