Posts by Chris Sunami
Readers enjoy moral dilemmas they can identify with, because it helps them form their own moral intuitions. But a dilemma must seem balanced in order to be compelling. In this case, perhaps you'v...
Giving your book a misleading title gives it an unnecessary extra hurdle to overcome in finding an audience. This title runs the risk both of attracting religious readers who will be disappointed ...
Screenplays have very strict formatting conventions. These serve two purposes: 1) They make the screenplay easy to read and understand for people familiar with the conventions. 2) They make a re...
Although this may be a real issue, in which case Mark's advice is excellent, it could also be psychological. I have learned that I always think my writing is amazing while I'm working on a project...
As someone who loves starting projects, and struggles with finishing them, I recommend you stick with your novel-in-progress unless there is a really good reason to abandon it. The reason is that ...
Is there a goal to all this, other than trolling your own audience? It seems that your alien character (and by extension, you) is trying to create a sort of "theater of the absurd" including blatan...
If your work is nothing but message, it isn't a novel, it's a polemic or an allegory. And reading the same polemic or allegory over and over would be excruciatingly boring, because there would be ...
If you are going to have it professionally edited, do that first before you do any other steps. These days, manuscripts must be 100% print ready before submission. A query is an introductory lett...
Write your book now, and don't worry about selling it until after it's finished. By the time you finish it, you will be older anyway. And even if you never publish it, it will still be good pract...
You don't "have" to do any work, unless it's written into your contract. But if you want your book to be a success, you'll want to work on promoting it. These days, even the best and biggest publ...
I find that some of the best, most personal ideas come from dreams. I've kept a dream journal on and off since I was a teenager, and a lot of the strongest ideas that have stuck with me have come ...
There is no one single magic bullet that performs all the work of promoting your book for you. This is why it is so hard to self-publish successfully unless you are also a great salesperson. Most...
There is a continuum between poetry and prose. Some prose is very poetic, and some poetry is deliberately prosaic. At one time, the distinction was easier to draw, because poetry was chiefly prac...
This depends greatly on the bookstore. Recently there has been a rebirth of small independent booksellers, which were once an almost extinct breed. A bookstore like that might be more inclined to...
Any rule can be broken, the trick is to know why the rule exists. In this case, it is difficult (and potentially frustrating) for the reader to (a) follow/understand and (b) emphasize with too many...
If you try to please everyone, you please no-one. Finnegan's Wake (Joyce) has gained and retained a reputation as a great classic of the English language, despite working hard at every turn to con...
This can, and has been done (here is an example of something similar), but it takes your book out of the realm of conventional fiction, and reclassifies it as what is called "experimental literatur...
Research can always reach a point where it becomes excessive, no matter what field you're in (even if your field is research, you do want to occasionally turn your attention to publication!). But ...
Usually if the love interest is uninteresting, it's because the author isn't very interested in him or her as a character. There's any number of (often quite successful) books and movies where the...
For me, the key to a plot twist is whether it makes "emotional sense." If people feel like your character has earned their success, then plot twists will seem extraneous. If they feel like your c...
If the character is drawn starkly enough, even very small changes can be very noticeable. The best example I know of is in Nabokov's Lolita. The narrator is an unrepentant molester, who is basica...
Many successful genre-bending stories are essentially one type of story in the setting of another. For instance, the original Star Wars is a fairy tale in space, and the early Harry Potter books a...
Traditionally, your rights revert to you after a specified period of time when the book is out of print. However, be cautious! In recent times, publishers have been able to circumvent this by plac...
There are famous, well-respected writers whose characters all sound alike, so if the rest of the writing is strong enough, it might not even be a problem. But to fix it, the only real solution is ...
Remember that just because the villain doesn't know the hero --very likely in this scenario --it doesn't mean that the hero doesn't have a personal connection to the villain. Not only is this ofte...
