Posts by Chris Sunami
There are actually quite a lot of popular and critically acclaimed children's books with tragic elements. Many kids dislike these, of course: I remember despising Bridge to Terebithia as a child, ...
Autobiographical fantasy is not unheard of --Borges practiced it in many of his short stories, and the Baron Munchausen novel was based on a real life autobiographical fabulist. The frame story fo...
Usually people find things moving when they identify with them. So your best bet is to start with an identifiable character, and then show that person making choices that, while they might be wron...
Realism is just another style, fiction is never reality. With that said, unrealistic characters can make it harder to suspend disbelief, identify with the characters or care about them, regardless...
The more symbols you have, the more your story becomes an allegory --a conceptual or abstract argument conveyed through metaphor and narrative --and the less it functions in its own right as a piec...
The answer depends on the work's intent. If the characters are thinly characterized and stereotyped because the work's main attraction is a sensationalist plot crammed with dramatic events, then w...
It's impossible to know for sure without seeing the paragraphs, but yes, formal writing is generally done in a "neutral voice," which tends to minimize the impact of individual stylistic difference...
You could always elide the worst bits because the characters themselves find them too horrible to dwell on. "Honey... did they?" She nodded slowly, a tear trickling down her cheek. The ad...
I think the problem is less style itself than the fact that your readers are taking your writing style as indicative of a problematic attitude. Let's take the sentences you highlighted and the sug...
In general, I think @lostinfrance's answer is excellent, this is just a supplement to that: You can't necessarily ever know if your book is ready or not in terms of content, but you do need to mak...
Part of why we read fiction is to learn something by going through an experience with the character --that's what makes identifying with the character important. For someone to lose what they and o...
It is tough to get published in a magazine or journal, but if you want to be a professional writer, I think that's the route to go. Most writing contests are not terribly high visibility, and quit...
This doesn't seem to me like a serious problem, it's just a part of your own personal writing style. Even in technical writing, you don't necessarily want to edit all individuality out of what you...
There's a technique that can be helpful for someone imprisoned by perfectionism, but it does require a certain amount of willingness to try it: The idea is that you commit to producing a certain a...
If you write a history, it will likely be of interest only to yourself (or as preparation for your book). That's not necessarily a reason not to write it. JRR Tolkien put years of effort into wor...
Typically, italics indicate when a word is being used in a non-standard manner. This seems to me the best choice for the examples given. I could see capitalizing if it was being anthropomorphized...
It seems you're using the term setting in a non-standard way to mean genre conventions. Given that, I would say that a mastery of genre, including the fulfillment of the expectations of the core a...
For me, it all comes down to emotional reality, which can have very little to do with the externals of the scene. When I watch a big Hollywood blockbuster where the lone hero takes on an enormous ...
In a sense, this is the whole point to an epilogue --if it had the same feel as the main narrative, it would just be the last chapter. Epilogues exist solely to solve the problem of authors wanting...
I think the answer has to come from who your characters are, and why they are using slang. Essentially slang is an in-group word-game. It's a way of distinguishing insiders from outsiders. It ca...
At least part of why we read is to learn something --that doesn't mean the characters in the story need to learn something, and it doesn't necessarily mean a moral lesson. You might simply learn w...
(I thought @what gave a great answer, which I upvoted, but it also made me want to look for counterexamples.) In Remains of the Day the main character is a repressed butler who devotes his life to...
In this example, just move the word in question outside the quotation marks: It is possible for God to desire "all people to be saved." It's more difficult in the case that the word in questi...
It's unlikely anyone will make that connection unaided, but, speaking as a big fan of lyrics, it's not necessarily a problem if people don't understand everything in your lyrics. Even more than is...
Note: Not a legal expert If you based a character in a historical novel on a real person from the present, it would take a fair amount of concerted effort for anyone to even notice, and even if th...
