Posts by System
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...
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 ...
A good solution is to clearly show how the flaws are an obstacle for the character when they try to achieve their goals. For example, if the girl in your story manages to seduce the boy who is in ...
If your book truly needs to be this long, then it needs to be this long. Destroying your book by cutting it etc. will only diminish its quality and make it less publishable. If your book is truly ...
What I do: immediately make essential changes that affect later chapters If I just write on, I will have to revise even more, than if I go back now and rewrite the first chapters, before I conti...
Few short publications, that summarize the differences, and guide to a decision: 1) S1000D or DITA – Which Should You Use? ...A dude with 30+ years in the business of aerospace and software develo...
The disappearances you gave as examples where very likely not unexplainable from the perspective of the disappeared people. They just seem inexplicable a few hundred years after the fact. Similarl...
WARNING: MULTIPLE TV TROPES LINKS In my three-part series, The Ragnarǫk Cycle I plan having my protagonist and deuteragonist to undergo a character arc. The protagonist, Joseph Norton to put it l...
Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy is when the audience is put off by the incredibly dark nature of a fictional work and won't care what happens next, lose interest or want all the characters to die ...
The real question here is: How often does it matter to the character where he is? If, as in your story, your character leaves his coat behind and wanders the streets in winter, he will probably f...
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. ...
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...
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 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?
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 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 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...
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...
