Posts by Craig Sefton
I've not done collaborative writing before, but I've read several works, and sometimes the text strikes me as having a split personality: some parts were clearly written by one author, while others...
Have a look around for the AD&D 2nd Ed. Monstrous Compendium (or whatever the current equivalent is under their new rules), which listed hundreds of possible monsters (I think there were severa...
A narrator can mix up past and present tense without issues, especially if the narrator is telling a story now about events that happened in the past, but is giving their thoughts as to what they t...
As stated in the other answer, ESP should be in all caps. One way around this problem is to come up with a term that people would use in every day usage to refer to someone with this ability. This ...
Well, first of all, Picasso never said it. Please see, for example, this investigation which could find no evidence to suggest Picasso ever said this. In fact, the earliest quote that could be foun...
You have a number of options: If the narrator of the book is a human, it would be entirely acceptable to use "he" or "she" (no point in switching between them) throughout the book as standard, wi...
My suggestion is you should read more detective stories! There are plenty that are done from the viewpoint of the protagonist. Probably the purest form of this is the private eye monologue, which ...
I'm not entirely sure your example demonstrates the lack of public stakes. The world of the novel is the immediate world the character inhabits, a social world that encompasses all the characters w...
There are several books that provide an excellent breakdown of the elements that make a good story or script. For example, The Writer's Journey by Christopher Volger identifies common archtypes and...
This is a bit like asking how long a piece of string should be. A fantasy work should be as long as it needs to be, no more, no less. One book, three books, ten books, as long as that's how it sho...
To me, this question confuses what "realistic" means when it comes to characters in fantasy. Characters should be realistic in the sense that they're realistic for the story itself, not necessaril...
I would say 100% you should be well read in your genre. There are several reasons why, but the most important is because you should become familiar with conventions in your genre. Why is this imp...
As a basic boundary, Fantasy depends on what couldn't be. The amount of fantasy can be slight, or it can be grand, but that strangeness element must be there. More importantly, for a work to be rec...
I'm assuming that when you say "realistic fiction", what you really mean is "non-fantasy fiction". Then the answer is, of course fantasy has less of a readership than "realistic" fiction, because y...
As far as UK style guides go, what you're probably looking for is the Oxford Guide to Style, formerly known as Hart's Rules (that link also contains a useful section outlining what the nearest US e...
Unfortunately, I can't think of any stories that follow your strict requirement on excluding anything that "is able to reproduce". The closest I could come is Ray Bradbury's short story, "There W...
The best way to avoid this problem is to understand your characters as deeply as possible, and remember that it is the character who should speak, and not you, the author. The things characters say...
Your list is pretty good, but it's missing something a bit fundamental. Most reviewers tend to think that they're trying to help someone make up their mind whether or not to buy a book based on th...
I'm assuming here that you mean you've got your own footnotes, but some of the citations from the original work contain their own footnotes from that work. If this is the case, the first question ...
There are a number of ways I've seen this done. For single word items, I suggest either use no punctuation, or use semi-colons, with a period for the last item. For example: Apples; Pears; Orang...
It depends on what you want to say/imply. "Engulfed" implies the fire completely surrounded him. "Jumped on" is an odd one, because it implies that it only affected a particular part of his body....
