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Activity for Chris Sunamiā€­

Type On... Excerpt Status Date
Edit Post #18390 Initial revision over 4 years ago
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Answer A: "Dear Stack Exchange, I am very disappointed in you" - How to construct a strong opening line in a letter?
It depends on what your goal is --an open letter can have many different audiences, and the putative addressee may not be the actual target. With that said, the best structure for a persuasive argument is to start with common ground , and to show how the same things that all sides agree on lead inevi...
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over 4 years ago
Answer A: How do I introduce a large cast in an interesting way
Don't introduce them all at once --that's not a story, that's a cast list. Bring them in one at a time, or in small groups, when needed by the storyline, and describe them in ways that illuminate their importance to the protagonist and the narrative: > There, standing outside the door was Rachel. H...
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over 4 years ago
Answer A: Detail vs. filler
I've always struggled with sensory details in my writing --I'm a dialog-and-plot kind of writer. But for me, writing details really came alive when I discovered your number three approach. When done right, the details offer you so much opportunity for layered, immersive storytelling. Perfunctory, by-...
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over 4 years ago
Answer A: Resolving moral conflict
This is not a problem, this is an opportunity. Great stories are written about insoluble moral conflicts. The fact that you've created one that you --and the reader --can't immediately and easily resolve means you're doing something right, not something wrong. You've accomplished something many writ...
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over 4 years ago
Answer A: Is it a good idea to leave minor world details to the reader's imagination?
It's perfectly fine to leave details up to the reader's imagination. But those comparisons are neither doing work for you nor for the reader. They have the look and feel of descriptions, but they are empty. Let's look at some ways of potentially using this technique: 1. > "The trees were full of ...
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over 4 years ago
Answer A: As a discovery writer, how do I complete an unfinished novel (which has highly diverged from the original plot ) after a time-gap?
I'm largely not a discovery writer myself, but many --perhaps most --of my favorite authors are discovery writers. It seems like discovery writers almost universally struggle with endings --for obvious reasons --and I've read my fair share of horribly disappointing endings to otherwise great books. I...
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over 4 years ago
Answer A: Writing a love interest for my hero
The kinds of criticisms you are encountering are not aimed against the concept of the hero having a love interest. They are aimed against female characters that that exist only as a motivation for the hero , and that are, as a consequence, generic, cliched, stereotyped, unrealistic, and unsatisfying ...
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over 4 years ago
Answer A: Is this kind of description not recommended?
Sometimes you'll see authors avoid constantly repeating character names by replacing them with descriptors. For instance (assume that all three descriptors are referring to John, the tall man who is Martha's son). > John walked to the window. The tall man looked across the field. Martha's son was fe...
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over 4 years ago
Question Transitional sections
As I mentioned in my other recent question, my novel in progress has three main locations. I feel those three settings are strong, fully imagined places, with interesting storylines. However, they aren't side by side, and this is a setting where travel takes time and effort. So I have two more locat...
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over 4 years ago
Question Avoiding episodic writing
I'm working on a novel that will have at least three distinct sections in three distinct locations (the two main characters start in the first location, travel through the second location, and one stays in the third location). I have an overall story arc that connects the whole narrative, and I thin...
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over 4 years ago
Answer A: What's the point of writing that I know will never be used or read?
For many years --decades actually --my goal with every piece of writing I wrote was that it be read and appreciated by someone. There were plenty of things I wrote that didn't achieve that goal, and ended up moldering away in some corner of my hard-drive, but I viewed those projects as failures. I wr...
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over 4 years ago
Question What's the point of writing that I know will never be used or read?
Writing can be a very difficult, frustrating, stressful and effortful process. It can also be very isolating to the writer. Given that writing is a form of communication, what is the point of writing material that you're pretty sure no one else will ever read? Isn't it a complete waste of your time a...
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over 4 years ago
Answer A: A torrent of foreign terms
Realism is just a style --you're trying to give readers the feel and the flavor of this character, not give them an exact transcription of what his actual thoughts would be. That gives you several possible ways to attack this question: - Present him as though he was consciously addressing an audien...
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almost 5 years ago
Answer A: Why do most authors shed their LitRPG elements as the stories go? Is it a genre convention?
Current practice for attention-calling literary elements --I'm thinking primarily here of things like accents and dialects --is to start out with enough to give the flavor, and then to assume that the reader can extrapolate that those same things are continuing in the background , even if they are no...
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almost 5 years ago
Answer A: How to display a duet in lyrics?
I've seen this done several different ways. - Chorus in bold (typical in printed lyrics to be sung from if everyone, including the lead, sings that part together) > It was in nineteen hundred and twenty nine > Run come see > I remember that day pretty well > Nineteen hundred and twenty nine ...
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almost 5 years ago
Answer A: Should I describe a character deeply before killing it?
The superficial problem is whether the readers will care about this character, but the deeper problem is YOU don't care about him. You even describe him as "it" --there's no emotional investment here. It's fine to start telling your story at the point where the father is killed, but you need to have...
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almost 5 years ago