Posts by Cyn
Young adult vs adult fiction isn't about the age of the characters (though that usually does vary too), it's about the age of your readers. If you're writing for adults, then write for adults and ...
Clickbait isn't like news where you tell someone the headline so they'll click for more information. Eggplant linked to lower cancer rates. Clickbait is where they have to click just to find ...
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 need to install a foreign dictionary Microsoft Word can use multiple custom dictionaries to check the spelling of your documents. A custom dictionary allows you to supplement the main d...
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...
Dialogue quotes are for things a character actually says. If your character says "hahaha" then fine. But I've never heard anyone do that. You might get a single "ha!" but that's an exclamation n...
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...
The idea of "first drafts" and "second drafts" is a concept from our school years, from when we sometimes had to turn these things in labeled as such. It also comes from the way most writers used ...
Think about why you're doing this. Your readers liked everything about your story except they wanted more of the ending. So instead you're giving them more of everything except the ending? I thi...
"I write stories for adults only." or "I write erotica." It all works. There's enough out there that is NC-17 or even a hard R, or the book/TV/comic equivalent, that people get it if y...
I recently finished reading a novel in translation to English from Russian. The title was in Latin (in the original edition, the title was transliterated to Russian, but the English edition was in...
Ask his wife Either you're so much inside his head that you're not seeing him the way others do, or you're an outsider suffering from hero worship. You need to get into other people's heads and s...
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...
There are two separate issues here: What do you call your story as you pitch it? How would your story be marketed? Although you tag marketing and use the word, you're asking more about the seco...
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...
How technology works is sometimes in a novel or movie or other work (some authors give you every last detail, like Andy Weir) and sometimes it's just there as a given. While avoiding explanations ...
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...
