Posts by System
I agree with Standback, but his answer is not generally true. In this time and age, most readers of Fantasy and Science Fiction have seen so many Science Fiction and Fantasy movies that their mind...
Many authors avoid reading – or reading anything even remotely related to what they write – while they are writing, to avoid being influenced by the ideas and style of other writers. My recommendat...
I have a primary source whose editor often has editorial comments in his footnotes. There are occasions when I would like to quote these remarks, but I cannot understand how to correctly do this fr...
I'm going to answer this from a different point of view. What you ask for, and what many inexperienced artists crave, is a secret or formula they can follow to create outstanding art. They read ho...
I don't know of any software that can do this. What I have done in the past, and what I'm doing again after trying to work with Excel, is write my outline in a text document. Each chapter is a num...
I know how attached I can get to my character names, especially since it usually takes me weeks to come up with them (no exaggeration), but as a reader I also know how little importance character n...
I am not asking you to tell me to keep my sentences less than 20 words long because I am determined to write some really long sentences. What I want to know is how to avoid sounding unnatural. Do I...
There are those that claim that bestsellers cannot be made. They advise you to write the story that feels most relevant to yourself, because otherwise your writing will feel void and empty. Then t...
I do not see much difference in style between Goethe, Proust, or Hawthorne on the one hand, and whichever book I pick up in the bookstore today. They refer to a different world and use some differe...
Your characters do not need to sound different. Reading current fiction, I rarely can tell the characters apart by their voice alone. That is, if you take a page of dailog and remove all reference...
Scanning the boldfaced terms on this page, I have to laugh aloud because it makes me imagine a novel about a crime investigation without a crime! That would be a most intriguing book indeed – and I...
There is no ideal way. Some readers have a good memory for detail and will be irritated that you keep reminding them of what they know they have already read. Other readers will be reading your bo...
I have always been an avid reader of utopian novels. Not necessarily those that advertised themselves as such, but the small utopias, of people doing good, of relationships going right, of a happin...
I have done quite a lot of reading on the question of talent, and apparently what we perceive as talent is a combination of an inborn potential to be good at a certain task (for writing: creativi...
Only you know where your story begins. I'll ask you a few questions to help you figure out what you already know, deep inside: What is, for you, the seed of that story? The initial core idea from...
The denouement, or resolution, has many story-related purposes, many of which Wikipedia nicely summarises, but it also has a reader-related purpose: that of gently guiding the reader out of the sto...
I'm working on a plot-driven novel. The plot stands, and the changes the characters undergo, that is, the character arcs have been devised. What I need now is the lack or fault that makes my chara...
Read other novels. They have dialog examples. Observe people. They have dialog examples. Understand your character. Imagine you are that person. Try to speak how that person would speak. Act it ou...
I'm writing a story in first person. There's a point in the story where two characters are having a dialogue, while the narrator is listening. The problem is that the narrator is also in pain while...
In genre fiction, the antagonist is usually either known throughout the book or revealed before the end, so that protagonist and antagonist can battle it out during climax. What I am wondering is,...
I have an older source that has no pagination. My question concerns the correct mode of multiple parenthetical in-text reference to the source according to MLA style. In the works cited section: ...
I am a 12 year old aspiring writer who would love to enter writing contests. I'd like to find some writing contests that are free to enter, are for people my age, and preferably, have prizes. Ho...
Thought verbs Chuck Palahniuk, an accomplished master of showing, suggested an exercise to learn not to tell. The exercise is to not use "thought verbs". Instead of telling the reader what a chara...
The trick that most novels use is not to describe what is thought beautiful in that world. In most novels, when a character is supposed to be beautiful, this is simply stated, and it is up to the r...
I have written poems in iambic meter before, and they didn't seem to be wordy. And for a long time I have wanted to use metrical effects in my prose, which is called prose rhythm. But I am wonderin...
