Posts by Chris Sunami
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 ...
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 writi...
It's worth noting that "Choose Your Own Adventure" is a specific brand of children's novelty "gamebooks," and that nearly all books written in this format are released under that brand. It's not -...
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 obv...
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, the...
The initial problem was that writers (mostly, we assume, male) were writing female characters that were thinly imagined, stereotypical, and largely there only to reflect glory at the male protagoni...
As a long-time blogger, I can say from experience: It's much harder to get any traction with an audience if you don't have a specific topic or theme. But it depends on what your goals for the blog...
You have made a common mistake about world-building: believing that it all has to go on the page. World-building is for you, the author, to help you craft a story in a setting that feels real and ...
If you are not primarily an "exploration writer" (or even if you are), there is a lot of advance work that can make your first draft better. This includes worldbuilding --coming up with rich and e...
While I'm not qualified to advise you on this specific question, I do have some good general advice. Start by doing some research in the form of interviews with someone who resembles your characte...
In order for your last ending to feel worthwhile, it needs to complete some important part of the protagonist's story arc left unfinished at the big battle. The Wizard of Oz has an anticlimatic se...
I've read books written the way yours is currently set up, and I agree with your beta readers --some foreshadowing would help. However, I think you could afford to be fairly subtle about it. Th...
It's hard to build a recognizable identity while genre-hopping. The more successful you are with any one style or genre, the more both readers and publishers are going to demand more of the same. ...
The breaking point will be different for different readers, because it all comes down to what we can learn from the character. If we can genuinely put ourselves in the character's place, we'll hav...
This isn't a standard short story, so present it in the most clear and understandable format, so your readers won't have to play guessing games, like so: Mark: I met Jim when we were in third g...
Can you give it a frame story that gives a coherent overarching narrative that these all stories fit into organically? For instance, the POV characters all meet up in a temporary refuge after the ...
Self-publishing is viable for all and only the people who are willing and able to personally sell every copy of their own book (or eBook). It's great for public speakers, relentless self-promoters...
Using words wrongly or awkwardly sounds much worse than having a restricted vocabulary. Therefore, your best bet is to stick to words you know well and are comfortable with. If that includes a wi...
The Big Bad, by definition, is the primary antagonist of a story built around the defeat of a primary antagonist. If defeating the Big Bad isn't the end of the story, then either that person wasn'...
Audiences always confuse the author with the narrator, and your chosen format makes this particularly difficult. Slam poetry is typically confessional in nature, which means that your audience is ...
I think it's fine to have an up-down-up-down structure, but that one of the lows, probably the second one, should be significantly "lower" than the other one. Otherwise it does just feel like a re...
There are better and worse ways to do this. It can be difficult and needlessly confusing to have multiple first-person narrators --difficult to give them authentically different voices, and confus...
Stealing jokes, while not exactly uncommon, is really despised and looked down upon from within the comedian community. It's hard to tell from your description whether you're really just "insp...
Worldbuilding gives you the setting in which to tell a story. It is not the story itself. As a writer you need to wear many different hats. Architect is one hat, and editor is another, but the o...
Perhaps this character "wants" to be someone quite different than you are trying to make her be. It sounds like she's making a mystery of herself. Perhaps this means she isn't who she claims to b...
