Posts by Cyn
A few alternatives: She dived into the flower. She dived into the zinnia's flower. She dived into the petals. She dived into the zinnia's center. Or, simply: She dived into...
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...
AM and FBI are not abbreviations, they are acronyms. We know to pronounce them letter by letter because they are fully capitalized. In some cases, they also have periods after each letter (with n...
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...
Ideally, the way you write is the right way for the story. It sounds like you have one basic style and it may be a nonfiction/essay style. That's the style most people develop first, because not ...
Make each of the three, full well-rounded characters who have multiple interactions with not just each other but other people. And with distinct and believable personalities. Show how the two tre...
At a bare minimum, you need a central landing place to direct people to in your marketing. The important items you want to cover are: Title and brief description (genre, audience) of your book. ...
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...
Make the character part of the setting. There are various methods for making a person in a story appear to be the main character (or at least a prominent one). For example: Giving her a name (o...
Coming to this question 2 years after it was posted, I find the following: Of a total of 11 reviews, there is 1 5-star review, 1 4-star review, and 9 1-star reviews. Nothing in-between. Of the l...
The short answer is, you can do this any way you want. But how you do it will set the tone for the story. If you write it in a log format, it will bring to mind military experiences or a formal l...
How do you know what the sparrows are thinking? I mean that sincerely. If you're watching them, you attribute dialogue to them because they're obviously communicating things to each other. They ...
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...
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...
"Show don't tell" is a general rule which basically means: immerse your readers in your story. It's not meant literally (as others have pointed out) and it doesn't just apply to body language. Fo...
Similarities are not the same as cliches. Various pantheons have a lot of overlap because they draw on universal aspects of humanity. Food. Fire. Home. Love. Children (and childbearing). Pro...
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. ...
I think it's a mistake. You certainly can do it and probably get away with it. But why make a tonal shift so severe if there's no real reason for it? Even though these are different characters, ...
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...
I wrote this before the poster indicated that this was a speech. My advice still applies, it just needs to be on a shorter timeline. Write what you want, show it to people you trust, revise, then...
The other answers outlined the basic methods and hopefully you've already used one of them in your story. Another possibility is that the protagonist works in an industry that the bad guys require...
Creating fictional places within a real world setting not only works in fiction, but it's extremely common. Creating the the fictional space is helpful because it allows you to flesh it out howeve...
