Posts by Matthew Dave
If you want special areas to denote onomatopoeia, I have a great new medium for you to discover: The comic book. Unfortunately, the narrative medium was not made for the purpose you're proposing. ...
While the other answers are great and focus on tangible assets of the world, I'll try and find an answer that focuses instead on stylistic elements. I would say that a good way to get across apathy...
Ensure there's enough objective external cues to indicate precisely that. For example, did his throat start to sting or his eyes tear up when he saw his enemy in pain? In addition, perhaps have him...
If you're just doing it for its own sake to bask in your own 'cleverness', it stands out like neon in a windowless room (see: The recent fallout regarding the ever-'subversive' Season 8 of Game of ...
I think my answer may be a tad tinted by my atheism, as I believe every faith and pantheon operates as a function of how a culture interacts with nature, the difficult-to-predict, and the unknown, ...
Self-publication, alas, often ends up making a black mark on your track record to traditional publishers, as it says the following: I don't want to go through the quality checks required to get t...
Harry Potter was not the first book series to have wand-wielding magicians, and it won't be the last. The best thing to do is just give your own world's wands an identity. My own world has wands/s...
I find it somewhat problematic that people seem to desire fantasy books not merely about relatable protagonists, but them in particular. I personally shrug it off; I don't think there's ever gonna ...
Self-projection into one's stories is an inevitability. Whose lens affects your outlook on life, and thus the worldbuilding/tone of your novel? That's right, yours. Who is the only person you have ...
When it comes to using fictional terminology for concepts with real-life equivalents, the best usage is for flavour; to establish what kind of culture the setting is. A good way to do it is to make...
As long as the words are used correctly and, as you put it, for precision's sake, it should come off as naturally high-brow. One can tell a thesaurus junkie from one simple aspect; the writer doesn...
I like to be semi-subversive in that most characters have non-meaningful names for the plot and anything out-of-universe, but they should mean something in-universe. Namely, they should fit the cul...
Well, remember, many totalitarian regimes are in fact woefully inefficient. Largely because the emperor/fuhrer/first citizen needs to make sure the people beneath him are either not ambitious enoug...
A simple answer for a simple question. Yes, at the end. That's how mysteries work. Edit: I'll elaborate. Mystery, as a genre, revolves around building suspense around an unknown factor, and the p...
If you want to be truly neutral about these things, just say 'She had notably large breasts' and leave it at that. However, plenty of other users have brought up an excellent way to do this while a...
Shippers will always mistake close friendships as homosexual, because of all the natural chemistry that comes with written close friendships. Folks will have 'shipping goggles' on no matter what, a...
According to the linked website you provided, the points are pretty self-explanatory. Copy-pasting from the site: The character’s name A one-sentence summary of the character’s storyline The char...
Make the gestures culture-neutral, or describe the intent of the hand gesture. For example: He gestured across his neck with a cutting motion. This generally implies decapitation, meaning any...
One way to do it is to write a novel that doesn't have the big bad as a crutch, or the sole instigator of conflict. Perhaps the consequences of the big bad's actions, like a long-standing distrust ...
The audience will come to understand professional jargon the same way as they would understand, say, a fantasy-only term for a fictional universe; they'd infer from context, and only in the direst ...
At the moment, your suggested dialogue is very dry. Every piece of dialogue should ideally serve one of two purposes: 1: Move the plot forward. 2: Expose something about a character/their relatio...
Well, I'd say that if the character is human, saving humanity is kind of in their best interests. It's not a motivation that's unique to him as a character, but it's certainly believable. If the v...
If you establish it as a convention in your novel, no. Being honest, while there are uses for outright stating thoughts as streams of dialogue-like prose, it's still a very telly form of expositio...
Torture Porn has a certain revelling tone to it, it enjoys the specifics for no other reason than, as Amadeus put it, its own sake. Instead of using torture as a device to show, say, that someone i...
My answer to this is quite simple: Show proof that they're wrong in-story. Doesn't have to be blatant, doesn't have to be screamed, but if you have a reader who is detail-oriented enough to pick up...
