Posts by System
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
What K. M. Weiland writes there is complete and utter nonsense. Fear is a signal to avoid danger. Once the danger is past, fear will subside. If you experience lasting fear, that is pathological ...
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 ...
I have a son who is eleven years old. He reads most of his books on his own, but sometimes, just for fun, I read a chapter or two to him at night – or I even read some of his Middle Grade fiction m...
This is more or less a follow up to a question I had previously asked. Reading British writers from the last 19th century, like Bram Stoker, and the early 20th century, like Bertrand Russell, Winst...
Apparently it will all depend on the kind of book you want to write. Literary fiction is full of difficult characters. I don't think Captain Ahab is very likeable, and yet the book's a classic. Bu...
This will largely depend on the kind of book you are writing and your writing style. Contemporary genre fiction is often rather focussed and almost concise. The rule that everything you write shou...
Yes, there are distinct differences between pre-school-age, Middle Grade, and Young Adult fiction. If you look at how children develop from infancy to adulthood, certain ages are distinguished by ...
