Posts by System
I hope my question is not off the site's topics. When writing one or two premise sentences for a story, may the premise sentences be in the first POV or third POV, or either POV may be used? Do t...
For those of you who are unfamiliar with TV Tropes lingo, a Complete Monster is the worst kind of villain imaginable: one that is evil to the core and has little to no redeeming traits whatsoever. ...
Acknowledgments that list about two or three pages of names have become an annoying fad that I would avoid. Sam Sacks argues "Against Acknowledgments" in The New Yorker, because to him they dimini...
A book proposal and a query letter are two distinct kinds of submissions. You write a query letter when you have finished writing your book and query whether the publisher is interested in it. Yo...
Celtschk's solution works well for an omniscient narrative, where the narrator can directly comment on the character's actions or imply their judgment through their narration. You can not only writ...
The problem you face is common for authors who identify with their protagonist. You look at your story from the eyes of your main character, and everyone else is just defined in relation to the pro...
I assume that this is your first attempt at a novel, and that you are suffering from a strain of "worldbuilder's desease". Brandon Sanderson has dedicated one of his lectures to the problem, you m...
When should a writer kill their protagonist off? Inspired by a question about character lifetime and another about what makes the death of a character satisfying for the reader, I have begun to wo...
I have so many great ideas! I've completed several stories in my head but i've never put any to paper. How do I start? How do you start?
When you want to write the beginning of a novel, there are two helpful analogies to guide you through the process. The first analogy is that of waking up. When you begin to wake up, you are withi...
There is much advice out there on "how to write a killer opening line". Usually these blog posts or how-to-write book chapters list examples of first sentences from recognized masterworks or group ...
Looking at the function of the beginning of a novel, it is clear that it should hook the reader and draw him or her into the story. Different techniques for achieving the hook have been described, ...
There are quite a few examples of media where the protagonists are terrorists. Whether the characters will be acceptable to your readers will depend on what you do with them. There are several opti...
I am currently writing a character that represents Lust and is a demonic entity... but to tone it down for a YA audience. I thought of trying to make them "Love-based" instead, but I always envis...
You can look at this question from two levels: legal and writing. Writing From a writing perspective, in fiction there are no rules about how you have to cite other works. If you write an academ...
Starvation The information you seek is in the Wikipedia article on starvation. There it is explained how starvation leads to death (because important organs are "digested"), how long it takes (tho...
In my novel, the character is sitting in a café sipping coffee, and she is watching a busy street of people rushing towards London underground after the office hours. I want to express the thoughts...
Read Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. Not every recruit makes it through training or into the unit they wanted. The training is fun to read in itself. The training narrative serves to relate...
A free open-source tool for telling non-linear / interactive storylines is Twine Another non-free alternative to articy:draft is Chat Mapper From the forum posts and reviews I read, most that t...
It is good that you have identified a problem that seems to permeate your writing. If I understand the feedback you are getting correctly, the problem is that your beta readers simply don't care f...
To me the answer depends on why was slavery not abolished? If slavery remains in practice because enlightenment failed in America and economic and racist interests won, then (from the perspective ...
You can tell the reader directly and that is how it is commonly done. The world wasn't as bad as Jamie thought, but he didn't know it at the time. That's why you call it an "omniscient narra...
All aspects of translation, including the treatment of proper or made-up names, are the decision of the translator.[1] Firstly, as you correctly stated, the author cannot be expected to know the t...
Direct speech is in quotation marks, non-verbal communication, such as telepathy, is in italics, and thoughts are not marked up. Hello John. John turned around, looking for who had spoken in ...
Looking back on your career as a writer, what is the most fundamental piece of advice you wish you had known about – or that you had taken to heart – when you set out to become a writer? Before ...
