Posts by System
Being possessed by a foreign entity seems very tame in the stories where I have seen it. The event doesn't have the gravity that I feel it should, and the person usually goes back to living a norma...
Short answer: If in doubt, use KJV. Not that it is the most authoritative, or the most easily understood; but it is well-known, and has the advantage of being in the public domain, as was noted in ...
"That's not writing, that's typing." Indeed. I would not say that a first draft is necessarily bad. It likely requires some editing, but that might still make it hard to distinguish from the origi...
Mark Baker's response more-or-less says it all. Let me rephrase some of it: A book always has just one POV, namely that of the author, who is not necessarily a character. Then, the author may pret...
David Jacoby writes: “Some of the best and most rewarding writing I’ve done has been ghost, because (in my case, anyway) the LACK of a byline allows my normally rather, ahem, obnoxious ego to take...
There is a lot of advice on how to be a tech writer for software without a tech background. (That is, skills such as understanding end-users, investigative reporting-type skills to probe experts, e...
The "darkest hour" does not fall at the end, as Daniel Cann claims, nor is it the second turning point, as FraEnrico asserts. The "darkest hour" is usually called the crisis. The crisis comes af...
Your question is too broad. I'll narrow it down for my answer. Procedure In the case of coauthored biographies, the coauthor typically interviews the primary author (and other persons), assembles...
The question needs to be rephrased. Of course it is possible to write a story without any world-building. Here are some examples: War and Peace. Pride and Prejudice. The Autobiography of Malcolm X....
"Text wall" is a term that describes user-generated content in internet forums or on social media sites that take longer to read than the average eight second attention span of internet users. The...
In a comment to an answer of mine Mark Baker has suggested that the common, dichotomous view of writers as either "plotters" or "pantsers" or something of both might not be complete and that there ...
Some of the current answers are part of the problem that you have: they provide a cognitive approach. When your writing lacks "color" it lacks emotion. You cannot analyse other texts and conscious...
2. The one fundamental rule in scientific writing is clarity. Analogies, metaphors, and other figures of speech are never clear in their meaning but open to interpretation. When I say, for exampl...
I really think people are much too obsessed with not telling. Many of the novels I enjoy most, tell. Lots. If you have, for example, a group of characters recovering from a fight, just friggin' sa...
I won't repeat my answer to this related question here, but instead briefly remind you that writing about an alien world is exactly like writing about the real world. You are stuck on the idea that...
When we speak, there are often small pauses between syntactic units such as sentences. In writing, these pauses are signified by punctuation: I can come if you want. (without pause) I can ...
Readers of popular fiction (usually) want a clear protagonist, a clear goal, and a clear path of the protagonist to that goal. Readers also want the protagonist to struggle for his goal, so that wh...
Different methods have been suggested for copyediting, that is, for finding spelling and grammar mistakes (such as printing text instead of copyediting at a screen, using a different font, reading ...
Think of how you talk about other species in reality. There are no "women" or "men" among dogs, chicken, or ants. The words "man" and "woman" specifically denote human males and females. But there...
There is no postmodern canon that you have to work through to be able to participate in postmodern intellectual and artistic discourse. If you want to create postmodern art (which is always at the ...
I studied literature at university. We spent a lot of time extracting meaning from texts, and some time on understanding the process of writers. From what I learned there, I can assure you that the...
As I see it, there are three possible uses for such a scene. You show the skill of your protagonist because you need your reader to know it later. Just saying that your knight is skilled is not s...
Can men fall in love with characters in novels? Of course they can. Men and women fall in love with fictional characters of all kind. Think of the teen girl pining after a boy group, or the teen b...
I want to write a novel about [something or other] and now I wonder if it is possible to do [this or that].
