Posts by System
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
In language, when a mistake becomes common enough, it's standard usage. One way to check whether the original meaning of a word has evolved beyond your preferred usage is to check a dictionary or ...
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...
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...
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...
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?
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...
My rule of thumb is "the right information at the right time", especially in content that's supposed to be consumed on a topic rather than a chapter/book basis. Sure, this leads to some repetition ...
Qualities of the documentation itself, even quantitive ones, usually have little intrinsic value. However, quantitive impact of docs on other areas can be often precisely measured and meaningfully...
