Posts by Jay
I'm a white Baptist who is married to a black Baptist, so if you have specific questions about the sort of things we say and do, maybe I can help. :-) What you describe is an example of a problem ...
My first thought on reading your question is a tangent: I find it distracting that you use the word "small" twice in such a short space. Is it important that the coin and/or the wallet is small? If...
I think the textbook answer is: Does the detail contribute to the story? If you describe how a character's house is filled with guns and bombs, that tells us something very different about him than...
Page ranges are normally inclusive. "Pages 1-5" means pages 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. I think most readers would be extremely confused if you wrote "pages 1-5" and mean 1, 2, 3, and 4. Note that you sho...
Your question starts out asking about plot holes but then you appear to shift to asking about humor and parody. Those are not at all the same thing. I suppose you could describe both as "the story ...
Do you HAVE to? Of course not. But how many copies are you expecting or hoping to sell? I've self-published 4 books. All non-fiction, which I think is rather a different market from fiction, but w...
I read an article by a writer once in which he said that he spent a great deal of his time putting doors in alleys. And he explained that what he meant was, if he has a scene where the hero is bein...
This is the same problem that experts always have when trying to explain their field to the general public. My advice is: don't be such a purist. I develop software for a living. Computer systems...
Most attempts at classifying things like this are completely arbitrary. Different writers will come up with different lists, and it's not like you could somehow prove that one is right and the othe...
As you say yourself, "show don't tell" is a guideline and not an absolute rule. I write computer software for a living. (Sadly, I make way too little money writing to live on.) I've had many occa...
As Secespitus says -- and I upvoted his answer -- if you delay describing a character, then the reader forms a mental image, and then later you break it and it's very disconcerting. The reader now ...
I haven't seen the presentation you describe and it's not clear to me what sort of marketing it calls for. You mention giving out a free sample. Like a sample chapter or something? I see two big ca...
This is a big subject that probably can't be answered in a brief post, but some thoughts that come to mind: Give objective facts, not subjective evaluations. For example, "I was valedictorian", ...
As @MarkBaker said, there are lots of "accidental" rhymes in prose that no one notices. But if you structure your prose to call attention to a rhyme, I think in practice it's not prose any more, it...
Under US copyright law, anything created by the US government is not protected by copyright. It is automatically public domain. (There are some complexities to this that we could get into but they'...
There are two issues here: plagiarism and copyright. Plagiarism is when you copy from another writer (or composer or whatever, but we're talking about writing here) without giving proper credit. I...
I hate to give the old standby answer, "it all depends ..." But, it all depends. Of course in most stories there are characters who appear briefly to perform some specific function and then disapp...
This is a classic problem for writers. I once heard a lecture by Isaac Asimov, a well-known science fiction writer, where he said that his first attempt at writing fiction was set in a small town, ...
Is child mortality relevant to your story? If not, then I just wouldn't bring it up. There are all sorts of tragedies in the world. I don't consider a story unrealistic because it failed to discuss...
Yes, I find it distracting. To me, the problem is not so much if a name is hard to pronounce, but if it's difficult to figure out how it's supposed to be pronounced. Unless the spelling of a name...
Speaking as a white person, I can't imagine that I would be offended that a story contained no white characters. Depending on the setting, it might or might not seem odd. I mean, if the story is se...
"Am I allowed ..." No. If you do this, the Writing Police will come to your house, break down the door, and arrest you. Seriously, what do you mean by "am I allowed"? Who is going to stop you and ...
You'd have to check with the individual printer. At KDP, cost is based on color vs black & white and number of pages, and that's it. https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201834340 A 200 pa...
I hear this worry from many beginning writers. Often the question includes something along the lines of "What legal steps can I take to protect my work from being stolen?". Here's my capsule advic...
It depends how distinctive the name is. If you have a character named "John", well, there are lots of other fictional characters, and real people, named "John" would not bother me at all. There a...
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