Posts by Cyn
When the narrator is wrong about something in the book's world, it's called an unreliable narrator. When a narrator has a single point of view (sees through one character's eyes) then it's inevita...
When I wrote this answer, it was borderline a true answer to the question. With a recent question edit, it doesn't really answer it all. I'll leave it up as a legacy answer, unless there's a move...
Your beta reader feels the chapter isn't pulling its weight. It's not about being blown away, it's about a chapter having a purpose and engaging the reader. Because your reader has put it in thes...
This is something you need to be careful with. In popular Western culture, going back decades or further, jealousy is often seen as a positive trait. "His jealousy proves he loves me so much." E...
I do the same thing. This is how I've handled it. My novel is set in a variety of places and my aim is to use real places when feasible and realistic places when not. By coincidence, I also have...
You still want your dialogue to be real speech. It's just cleaned up speech. If you have a critique group, read the scene out loud to them. Ditto if you have people willing to read drafts. Yo...
I think the weirdness you're encountering is that you're using technical speak to convey something to the user who doesn't need to know that. To you this is a tab. While many (most?) people who u...
In a technical manual or documentation or anything similar, you wouldn't put emotion into the text. The only reasons to use an exclamation point are to convey strong emotion or a serious warning. ...
There are plenty of genres that exist solely for a particular purpose or to deliver a type of scene. Pornography (no comment). Slasher (mostly films, all about gory ends to stupid or unfortunate ...
One of the fun parts of learning a language is learning vocabulary, puns, turns of phrase, etc that just don't translate to your mother tongue. Any English learner (any learner of any language) is...
I'm not sure what you want is possible. You can set the time to be a bit ahead of right now. And do it by outright stating the date as the story begins, mentioning the date organically in the sto...
Every reader's opinion is valuable to a degree, though some carry more weight than others. If several people in your critique group are giving the same feedback, there's probably something to it. ...
Put your pauses wherever you wish but know that they will tell the reader how to read it. Poetry is meant to be read aloud. Or at least imagined so in the mind. Tell your reader how and where to...
You have two choices: Write it up in the same style as the other quotes but don't give an attribution. It is common enough for writers to put something poetic or otherwise different from the mai...
You can't This is not a romance. This is a master having sex with his slave. Or wanting to have sex. But he's going to free the slave! Is he now? But the person is still a slave when this all...
Use the name others use for her. It's pretty standard that, if a patient can't be identified, a placeholder name gets assigned. Jane Doe (in the US anyway) is a very common one (John Doe for male...
If you want a limited 3rd person narrator, then you need to accept the limitations that come with it. Either find a way to convey (or let go of) the information in your examples, or change the typ...
Don't try to chase trends. Everyone wants to be the next best thing. The perfectly timed topical hit. If that works out for you, great. But don't try to make it happen. Even if you finished yo...
You may be in breach of contract if you sell your books anywhere but Amazon. I'm not having much luck finding definitely contract information about this but one source states: As part of the e...
Comics have an age rating system similar to videogames, but it's not completely standardized. Marvel and DC, the biggest comics producers, have slightly different systems from each other. And her...
A main reason to choose a first person narrator in the first place is to limit the scope of the narrator (and to get deeply into that one character's head). So, no, the narrator should not be priv...
Books set in the future are Speculative Fiction Speculative fiction is an umbrella genre encompassing fiction with certain elements that do not exist in the real world, often in the context...
Wands have been a feature of magic for decades and perhaps much much longer. Tinkerbell in Disney's version of Peter Pan (1953) has a short wand that works with a flick of the wrist. I could com...
A theme isn't a "meaningful moral" Or even a regular moral. A theme is the central idea and a moral is a lesson. These can overlap, but they're not the same thing. It's okay to develop your the...
Asking for a certain number of pages, along with particular formatting, can seem like a holdover from a pre-computer age. They forgot to update their requirements! And sometimes it is. But anot...
