Posts by Cyn
I appreciate this question as it's something that can definitely be overdone. It seems to be a problem mostly of the plot driving the characters. We need people to do XYZ, so let's have character...
Use the narrator as a tool to avoid annoying the reader. The narrator controls the flow of information. Have the minions do their thing. Once. Then... The crowd clapped politely as the rule...
Joe is the worst. Nobody likes him, not even the so-called friends he teams up with at school, filling other students with terror. He's sarcastic, nasty, and a bit of a racist, and especially ant...
Guilty. I'm one of the people who told you to do seemingly impossible things. The truth is, sometimes you can't. Shadowing someone at their job or activity is often really really hard, and nobod...
When writing a book of your own, you absolutely can use other books on the topic as references. And you can quote those other books. In both cases, you want to credit the other book. For quote...
The main benefit is that people see your copyright as legitimate. To be sure, some people take ebooks and copy them and stick them right back on to Amazon under their own name and with all the m...
Stage productions aren't just about the script. In your corpse example, there are several ways to handle it and it depends on the director more than the playwright. The corpses pile up and then ...
I would like to followup on this excellent question which outlined differences among works for children, middle-grade, and young-adult. What are some clear differences in theme/story between child...
Say I have a book...or a comic series...or a podcast...or another published work. Marketing written or scripted works is perfectly on topic here, and most of the promotional materials are also wri...
It's very common to change titles with new editions of a book. Obviously, the title will be translated to a non-English language with this new publisher. When translating, it's common to change...
Your best bet may be a first person narrator. If your narrator is a character anyway, then the limited POV shouldn't be an issue. With 3rd person narration, even if it's from the POV of one speci...
Screenplays have less dialogue than you think! I too used to think that a screenplay was all about the dialogue. But when I researched the medium, I discovered that dialogue is just a part of the...
This is a hard one. You really need to go to another country and spend a couple days hanging out on base and seeing how they do things. Obviously, travel is expensive and you may not have other p...
Perhaps you understand hate, you just call it something else. Anger, distain, avoidance, disappointment, shock...these can all have elements of hate in them. Anger especially. The word "hate" ha...
Around a decade ago, I had a dream. An actual middle of the night dream. An entire movie played in my head, all I had to do was write it down. I did a fair bit of research on the topic then I sp...
The most famous ship of all (perhaps the one that started it) is K/S aka Kirk/Spock. Even though both characters have been portrayed as 100% straight. Many other characters have been shipped in...
Disabled people fear losing functionality as much as anyone else. Perhaps even more so, because they need to rely on existing functional parts more strongly than others do. What you want to avoid...
I say keep your real name. It's not exactly the same as any other author at the moment and none of the names you mention are unique enough that it would be confusing to use something similar. It'...
If you were describing a human being, you wouldn't say "she had two arms, each the same length and ending just below her hips." That description is assumed for everyone (if it's wrong for an indiv...
There are sites where artists who do book covers list themselves as looking for work. And there are individual websites or social media for various artists. Look around and find someone you like,...
What is a draft? I mean that sincerely. And I mean it as a frame challenge. Advice about numbers of drafts and other rules about writing usually comes from pretty old advice that doesn't apply...
It's fiction. It's probably closest to memoir, which is basically autobiography, a type of non-fiction. But then you say: The exact course of events in the story has never really happened in ...
Yes, it is credible. Grief is a horrible thing and losing a child is just about the very worst thing that can ever happen to you. Grief can make you do and say pretty horrible things. The best c...
Don't give a trigger warning in a book! Unless you're writing an actual nonfiction guide for rape survivors, a warning like that would be not just unnecessary but apt to get you ridiculed. It's s...
Writing is like a dance. I love ballet and modern and other dance forms but, way too often, it's all about the tricks. Triple pirouette. Step step. Leap high in the air. Step. Look! my leg is to...
