Posts by SF.
Do you have any tried and true techniques to make villains of your stories truly hated by the audience? I mean, frequently it's "eh, sure, that's bad, he's got to be stopped" but the audience woul...
Did anyone else write a thesis following these guidelines? Find a former, already accepted thesis document by someone else, eviscerate it of all content leaving only stubs to retain formatting and...
One easy way to go about portioning humor is picking a comical character (or two) and peppering the story with their wit, ineptitude, craziness, grave pessimism, or whichever other approach that ma...
If you want that in deep detail, provide a tour. If you want to cut on detail a little, make a scene of pre-heist briefing (or security briefing if that's the narrator's side). The leader describe...
The same solution as every decent DM has to Pun Pun. You Are Not The First Who Thought Of It. And the one who did think of it first really doesn't like competition. They are a background god, one...
If you can do it in the story, and the story will not lose on it, do it. If this would hurt the story, do it in prologue. There are a few reasonable tipping points: BORING. If the elements of th...
I don't think you will find any tragedy for children found acceptable in these times. Grimm and Andersen got "grandfathered in" for being classics, even though they were rewritten in more "acceptab...
One solid advice how to make it fly and make sure readers who don't know the myth aren't confused, and readers who know the myth aren't annoyed: Hang one good, sturdy lampshade on it. Have it expl...
The core character in my current work-in-progress is an immortal goddess (of the minor kind), who goes increasingly desperate. In her desperation she's about to do something quite terrible, and the...
PROGRES. Is there still anything left to achieve? If there is, why isn't this achieved yet? What obstacles are to be overcome? How do you overcome them? Or maybe... the utopia deemed progress is ...
Take some very generic, very simple, completely trivial and trite theme - something entirely unoriginal - and try to write it best to your ability... no, not even best, just adequately, correctly. ...
I'm completely sure picks like "as he walked up to", "he screwed his eyebrows and" or "as far as I know" will happen notoriously but they don't constitute plagiarism because they are very common ex...
You should watch - or maybe better read up on - Hitchcock's movies. Build up a sense of normal, dull life, then shatter it. The more standard, dull the image, the harder the blow hits, the stronger...
I'm afraid "infinite lists of items" are not really welcome here. OTOH, links to resources containing such lists are okay, so... Fridge Logic, Plot Hole Warning, TVTropes links.
The biosphere is the global sum of all ecosystems. It can also be called the zone of life on Earth, a closed (apart from solar and cosmic radiation), and self-regulating system. I think, if we...
The way I went about it, is giving the Stranger a Single-serving friend, to whom the Stranger dares to open up just enough to give us a glimpse, and who happens to be not nearly as single-serving a...
Normally, I specialize in strong, determined, uncompromising, extroverted protagonists, "If the laws of physics are against us, too bad, they need to be changed." I'm pretty good in getting them ri...
It adds a little difficulty to reading and thus a little chance to screwing up. Although, especially in first-person stories it's a very common and quite nice literary tool to leave the protagoni...
Primarily, cheat by writing the story backwards. Start from the end revelation of the implicit story (the crime) and progress towards beginning, iteratively removing any simplicity. Start with the...
Not being a native speaker I'm unable to tell if my poetry sounds fine or just awkward - I know I'm abusing grammar to fit rhymes and rhythm, but the question is: am I abusing it too much? Does tha...
The fiction I write currently hit a major snag and needs a big overhaul of a major part of the story. A whole, large thread is being injected, a second conflict running in parallel with the main on...
I'm in a long and painful recovery from many years of writer's block. Coming up with even quite simple story ideas costs me unreasonable amount of effort. Sometimes inspiration is generous and I'm ...
I sometimes write rather vicious satirical pieces that heavily reference (arguably - but possibly beyond the point of plagiarism; definitely the same setting, the same characters, strong references...
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