Posts by J.G.
When I read people's manuscripts to provide feedback, I can easily identify areas worth improving. However, feedback isn't all that helpful if it makes the writer give up, so good news needs to be ...
I can see why it feels hard. Almost all these symbolism tropes refer to a specific existing symbolism, rather than ways to create something new. So what are your options? Apples have other symboli...
I'm a mathematician and physicist who's routinely annoyed when fiction gets mathematical and/or physical details wrong, even in works that are meant to be about geniuses in the field, such as Good ...
Great writers do more than just say, "in real life people don't do X, so my characters mustn't do X". They understand why people don't do X, thereby informing their understanding of their own chara...
To me, the answer has always been pretty clear: fifty pages that happen to be double-spaced, i.e. an amount that would be about 25 otherwise. What would be really confusing is if they expected peop...
Warning: this answer links repeatedly to TV Tropes. Don't let this happen to you. Since all three methods you mentioned have drawbacks, I'll try to suggest tweaks to them. Let's start with readin...
Your rules might be too limiting, given how few vowels English has, even after you remember y is a semivowel. Obviously "use consonants instead" would require a huge rewrite, even if you can tweak ...
There's a lot to unpack here, at least if someone like me tries to post an answer, because I only half-agree with aims such as those of the Hemingway app. Also, some of what you say brings in addit...
In my experience, it depends on what the story needs. I've written stories that had to be plotted beforehand because of what the point of the story was. I've written stories that had to be half-plo...
You'll see a good example to learn from when protagonist Ralph meets Vanellope in Wreck-It Ralph. She annoys him partly because of a short-lived immature aping of his words, but mainly because she...
The difficulty with such a question is in the apparent need to choose which writer to side with. Are the sentences of Conrad 1910 too taxing? Do those in Landon 2013 go too far the other way? I hop...
Most first drafts are too long, and improvement usually involves removing a lot; and yet many beginning writers think they should make their story even longer. But suppose you've not made a mistake...
I agree with Cyn's answer. All I'd add is if you're worried about such sentences' clunkiness you can do three things: Say what the list is about before presenting the list; If this is likely to b...
the majority of my characters are mentally ill Is that true, or is it really only true of your main characters, or even of your protagonists? There's nothing wrong with a certain trait or char...
Edit: since I posted this answer, the OP has expanded their question to state the interest is in whether one should dumb down in the choice of genre. That is not what I expected herein. I hope what...
A term that describes itself, such as polysyllabic, is autological (see here for an amusing consequence of this concept).
Your worry is that Celeste expresses more feelings about their relationship's implications than Marko does, which could play into a "women have more feelings" stereotype. I assume Celeste is the pr...
I'm sure many people here are familiar enough with episodes of Doctor Who from 2005 onwards to know they faced this problem. Here's my advice: do what the series did from 1963 to 1989 instead. In o...
I wrote a story in a boarding school, its protagonist a student facing obstacles from a new teacher, the headmistress and her daughters. Later in the story, the new teacher discovered he would lose...
The recommendation to remove something that's good in its own right, but doesn't belong in the broader context of a work, is usually phrased as "kill your darlings". While this is now a literary jo...
I can't tell you how to think of a good ending, but we can summarize what it should achieve (though you might not need all of these): Have a character's personality or development somehow earn or...
Short answer: all three options work, so experiment. James Scott Bell wrote a whole book on how to write from the middle. I haven't read it yet, so I don't know how good the reasons are for doing ...
One can plan plot in details, or one can design characters' traits and see what story can't help but develop from that. You might find either approach or something in between serves you, but it sou...
You might not really know what happens when you try each approach until you use both, say to tell the same short story twice. I'm currently working on the fourth book in a series, and the first on...
Instead of focusing on whether you should lengthen the story, try to work out whether that will happen naturally as a result of whatever improvements your redraft mandates. For example: Are there...
