Posts by Cyn
Awesome work, Paulster2! I upvoted on Writing and Worldbuilding, because I don't belong to the other sites. You might also consider one on History, since that's a place where people writing histo...
Legends can be told in first person. Some myths from Ancient Greece, sections of the Christian Bible, Biblical Psalms, The Story of Sinuhe (from Middle Kingdom Egypt), and many others are first pe...
Sometimes characters surprise you. And that's okay. You're absolutely right to worry about a deus ex machina situation where a solution comes out of the blue with no rhyme or reason. This is the...
By inviting the relevant people (or their families) to your creative team. Many books and movies are made "with the cooperation of" so and so. This can mean a single interview, or just permission...
Establish their winglessness before you establish their method of gestating children. You're absolutely right that this is an easier task when you have a character who is from the culture of the r...
Anthologies are often different from other publishing. It is common for small publishers or even individuals to put together a call for an anthology to include any short work: comics, artwork, poe...
Foreshadowing is your friend. Your example of Harry Potter isn't quite right. Chapter One is titled The Boy Who Lived. Now that's a bit ominous. Magic is hinted at on page 1* and is outright on...
You are allowed to use new ISBN stickers on existing books. As defined by the ISO Standard, the ISBN publisher prefix (or "root" of the ISBN) identifies a single publisher. If a second publis...
When I was a graduate student teaching undergraduates how to write research papers, the real problem was over-quoting. Students would quote or paraphrase large amounts of other people's work and n...
How and where you cite depends entirely on your audience. For school reports and academic/scientific papers, you use formal citations both in the body of the text and in footnotes or endnotes. Y...
Tell it in narration. You have plenty of opportunity to show this character's social pathology in her adult life. And plenty of material to do it with. This establishes her personality and the l...
After reading the edits and clarifications and other answers, my suggestion is that you approach this in a similar way to publishing a book in general. Offer royalties on sales of the book plus an...
A happy ending is about the emotional response the work as a whole evokes in the reader (or viewer). A sad ending or any other type would be the same. It's the state you've reduced the audience t...
Sometimes you don't. You can (and should) read it out loud to yourself. But there really isn't a substitute for having other people listen to it. In my critique group, we read a portion of our p...
The short answer is yes, you can include this type of material. But it really depends on your audience and the scope of the book. You may not want to do it. If you're writing a very fact-based f...
This makes sense to me because my characters act in very similar ways. Have you ever been in a novel situation in your own life where you did something unexpected? Maybe you intervened when someo...
Skipping scenes is usually quite welcome in a novel. Sometimes you don't want to see every step. But the amount of skipping you propose is pretty jarring. You will break your readers out of thei...
You have two choices here. If the object is truly inanimate and there are no surprises, then you are writing a history of the object. If the object is anthropomorphized (think Disney talking teac...
If you're writing for an American audience, with an American publisher, then use an American dialect for your narration. But... your character is living in England. Whether she's British or an im...
Chapter names serve many purposes so, as long as your choice is one that fits with other chapter names, it's fine. If you always named the chapter after the POV character then you had one named af...
Alternative history is a mainstay of speculative fiction. Redrawing countries' borders is very often a part of that. Sometimes countries that exist in the real world are missing. Sometimes new c...
Grab a friend or family member and print out the scene so you each have it on paper. Ask the other person to read it out loud, acting it out to some degree. Was there a pause in your head that yo...
Put question marks when you have rising intonation. I suggest you read your poem out loud. Do this multiple times and really do it out loud, not just in your head. Try it with and without the qu...
When I was in high school, a friend and I wandered together downtown and came across a psychic's booth. Out of curiosity, we stepped inside. We were both writers, she told us. My friend wro...
One generally doesn't read lyrics like poetry. Sure, you can, but it's not as common. One reads lyrics to understand a song. If you're reading to understand how to sing a song, punctuation is pa...
