Posts by Cyn
Absolutely. My own book is filled with references to Judaism and to American Jewish culture (the number 18 is one). In lots of those cases, it's explicit, but not always. I would venture to say ...
C. You need to find the text the author is citing and cite it directly. If the actual statement is as vague as your example (I realize you may simply be using a generic example as a placeholder),...
Your student worker sounds like a valuable assistant. But he is not a translator. Even if he were doing actual translation work, a co-translator indicates someone doing work at the same level tha...
On-again/off-again relationships don't usually have smooth transitions. Especially not for outside observers (and often not for the participants). Add in that this is a teen relationship, and for...
More than words, toddlers remember actions. What is science boiled down to its core? It's the idea that you can form hypotheses about how the world works, test them, then come to a conclusion. S...
Writer's Digest is still chugging away with their Writer's Market series. With more specialities than ever. I found the 2018 (though the 2019 one is out) Poet's Market on Hoopla. (Hoopla is a re...
There is a difference between stereotypes and simply not fleshing a character out. For example, your main character goes into a coffeeshop, orders, and sits down to read. At the next table are tw...
If you want to avoid showing a character as "not like other girls" then make sure your "other girls" aren't stereotypical. The trope shows up with female characters who don't fit in. They don't h...
Is it okay? Well, it's likely legal (if the person is long dead anyway, and probably even if they're alive). You can do it. You might even get it published. For a large number of readers, the...
E. A scared Bob walks over to the door, hand on the knob. or BOB (scared) Who are you? While I haven't written scripts, I have acted some on stage. Giving the actor the basic reac...
Any full-service book printer can create custom sizes if they wish, it just takes more work and costs you more. Printing machinery generally only works with paper of particular sizes. This is why...
I'm Jewish. My middle-grade fantasy novel is very Jewish. Most of my characters are either Jews or converts/future converts or people with at least one Jewish grandparent. But some are not. My ...
What you may be looking for is an anthology. Anthologies are similar to magazines and, in some cases, may overlap. But they have significant differences and are often done by different types of p...
For a submission (to a grant program, competition, agent, or publisher) that asks for sample chapters, which chapters do you choose? For example, a grant program for unfinished works I'm intereste...
Your issue is common to many novels and other long works. Your characters aren't just dropping into and out of your MC's life (like you often see in, say, TV shows where the MCs have friends for o...
The important word here is "the." All of us use "the" to reference people whose names we don't know. We'd never say "the nameless person." Instead, we talk about "the waiter" or "the bus driver"...
Who is your audience? The audience for any kind of porn is not the character. (I'm speaking of the intention of the author, not who might actually end up watching it.) The intended audience for ...
I don't think you need to show anything special at all. Lots of people have multiple love interests (or hookups) over the course of a novel. In some novels, it's entire the premise. If a chara...
My middle-grade novel is third person with one primary and one secondary viewpoint character. Sometimes the narrator hovers a bit more, sometimes the narrator is more in the character's head. The...
Magic vs advanced technology is a common enough question in fiction that your readers will already be primed to wonder. I agree with Amadeus that the reference to "knobs" is, in and of itself, eno...
There are 3573 entries on Goodreads with the word "f***" in the title (I only splat it for this site, not for my own sensibility). The titles contain the full word, spelled out. 2744 entries with...
People will draw parallels between racism in your world and actual racism, because both you and your readers live here and now. It's not just that it can't be helped, it's part of why we write. W...
Both. If I get an idea, I'll have a good sense of the target audience. The age group, the genre, etc. But when I'm writing, it might morph. And that's okay. I'll keep writing and let it be wha...
I would name it once. Have the viewpoint character notice the panic on the other character's face. It can be near the beginning or closer to the middle of the scene. Maybe later. By "scene" I m...
Yes. Evoking visuals as metaphors in a way that leaves out verbal explanations of meaning is part and parcel of many (if not most) novels. Your example doesn't quite do this as you state, since i...
