Posts by System
Let's say you have two sides who are basically no better than the other. Both are criminals with no redeeming qualities, and both are at war. Think COBRA and HYDRA going to war. They both have pl...
I am mulling the idea of writing a novel in which the only dialogue is internal. Has anyone yet published such a novel? I define "dialogue" here as any kind of speech addressed by a fictional pers...
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...
The protagonist in my autobiographical novel is a girl on spiritual adventures. I have the idea of her looks in my mind, but I don't want to dedicate words to explicitly express her looks, so is it...
In psychology, the tendencies you have described are termed internatlizing and externalizing behavior. In extreme cases those tendencies lead to internalizing disorders, which were long thought to...
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...
The misconception at the heart of your question is that there has to be coherence between chapters, similar to the coherence between paragraphs. In technical and academic writing there is indeed c...
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 ...
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 ...
The question whether or not you may use ideas, characters, stories, and so on from other works has been addressed multiple times on this site; you will find them if you use the site search. The sh...
When I plot my own novels or analyze other works to understand their structure, I like to visualize the dynamic of the storyline(s) in a diagram. Usually I draw this by hand. A first version of su...
While honesty is an admirable trait, I feel the prime "purpose" of friends and family is to offer support, not criticism. People who make it in the world usually have close relations who stand by ...
Depending on how you ask, between one and ten percent of the population of Europe and about five percent of the US population identify as LGBT. About two thirds of them come out beyond their family...
Not receiving feedback from publishers, or receiving a rejection, does not tell you anything about the quality of your work at all. Publishers reject good books because they don't fit their catalog...
Many languages are written using Latin letters, but often these seemingly familiar letters aren't pronounced in the way that we are used to. For example, an English speaker might read the name Sio...
Which language do the French use when they search programming related information on the web? My mother tongue is German, but when I search information on the web on topics that aren't specific to...
Unlike the engineered hermaphroditic humans in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan universe, who might be speaking a future version of English, your hermaphrodites are an alien species and do not spe...
I seems to me that no one really took into account that we are talking about freewriting. The whole point of freewriting is that you don't stop to reflect, but write down your stream of consciousn...
It is completely unproblematic, if real people are part of the world that your fictional characters inhabit. For example, your detective Smith might see President Trump on tv and hear part of a spe...
Simply think about how you learn the background of other people in real life. You get some hints from what people do, what others say about them, and from the context in which they appear. Then yo...
It really doesn't matter IMO. It depends on how you feel with your story. It sounds to me like you have it planned well. Do you know what it will be called?
For online, developer-centered documentation for a complex software product, which structure is going to be more usable: a smaller number of long, comprehensive pages, or a larger number of more gr...
I'm (amateurly) writing the subtitles for an English TV show. I'll illustrate my question using a small example, but I'm hoping to receive answers as general as possible. One episode has a sentenc...
