Posts by Chris Sunami
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...
All writing in print is (technically) telling. You can "show" in a movie or a play, but everything you're doing in a book is telling, if you want to get technical about it. A lot of times it is b...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
Usually, writer's block is a result of your inner editor overpowering your inner writer. This is a very common problem that can especially affect experienced writers, critics, and others with a la...
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...
As @Galastel has already noted, the standard documentary approach is to film everything, and then to craft a story only at the end, and through the editing process. This is because the story you m...
In my opinion, erotic writing is more about frustration than fulfillment, even in an explicit context. Once you give the reader exactly what they want, you've spent your load, so to speak. So you...
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...
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...
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...
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. ...
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...
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...
Shakespeare, who may not have coined all the words he's credited with, but who certainly popularized a lot of neologisms, tended to recapitulate or paraphrase a possibly unfamiliar word in the same...
I think you've hit on the key in your question: All secondary story arcs need to reach a satisfying conclusion prior to the twist. This is because what we seek at the end of a story is emotional ...
There's a truism, origin unknown, to the effect that "bad decisions make good stories." If everyone makes great choices all the time, it doesn't lead to much in the way of drama or suspense. On t...
As a reader, I very much dislike large casts of characters, I lose patience and the ability to tell them apart quite quickly. However, a lot of it depends on how they are deployed. If your main c...
Assuming you aren't a woman yourself, I would suggest talking this idea through with several women to see how it strikes them. It can be difficult to see through the eyes of a group you don't belo...
