Posts by Thomas Myron
If I have an idea for a novel (consisting, let's say, of a premise and a vague idea of characters), how can I tell if the idea will turn into a series or a stand-alone? I don't want to start develo...
I am not versed in who used what when, so I can't tell you exactly what to use. Fortunately, I can tell you how to find out. In most fiction, your write for your readers. So if your audience is G...
I've recently been struggling with a very strange problem in my writing: I can't find the main conflict in my novels. This has inspired quite a bit of thought and reflection on exactly what a main ...
I'm writing my first series of novels, which will contain four books. As often happens, about half way through developing the books, I opened up the possibility for an entirely new series set in th...
As a general rule, dialogue is not bound by the rules of grammar as tightly as the rest of the novel. Therefore, if a person says something a certain way, you write it that way. As far as your exam...
It is not grammatically correct, no. To be grammatically correct, you would use: "Why are you laughing?" However, if your hero speaks a certain way and it would be natural for him to ask the ques...
The word 'but' follows the same rules as any other conjunction, just like 'and' or 'or'. It's a word that joins two phrases. All of your examples are correct. The first phrase ends with a comma, ...
Welcome to the site, Chimere! As a general rule, it's best to stick with one protagonist. As @Private has mentioned, if you have two, it should generally be a hero and a heroine (please see the com...
I am currently developing a series of fantasy novels, and have discovered that I will likely be adding a second point of view in the second or third book (five books total in the series). Up until ...
I would firstly like to say that the answer by @Jay is excellent, and provides some good pointers on which characters should be one-dimensional or three-dimensional. Like others here, I have neve...
I'm not going to tell you how to solve your problem. Quite frankly, I don't know how to solve your problem, despite having faced it countless times myself in the past. Instead, I'm going to show yo...
I am an aspiring author, and I have recently just begun developing my first novel. It is a series, but I have engineered the first novel to be a standalone in case the series falls through. When ...
Grammar Side-Rant (Ignore at will) First off, none of the words you have in bold are gerunds. A gerund is a verb form used as a noun. Examples would be: Hunting is a sport. We love sai...
In my current novel, the protagonist is driven forward throughout the plot by events that happened to him in the past. The reader needs to know these events, so I'd like to include them in a prolog...
This question is slightly less straightforward than the title implies, and requires a little explanation. Firstly, I am an entirely self-taught writer. Because of this, my methods are probably a ...
Background: I've been writing fan fiction for five years now. I began when I didn't have a clue what I was doing, so my methods have evolved during those years. By now I have a solid process that I...
I am currently writing a short book. I've neared the end of the plot, but now I'm seeing a problem: my conflict isn't ending at the climax. The climax should always be the point where all of the ...
Not only will the potential pitfalls largely vary from person to person (not to mention what different people think they are), but they are innumerable, and in a variety of fields. When you are an ...
As provided in this excellent answer by @what, there is a certain 'creative time,' for writing, when you can write the best. I've been aware of this for awhile, though I never really saw it for wha...
I think I see what your problem is. According to my handy grammar handbook: The exact words of a speaker should be set off from the rest of the sentence by using a comma, a question mark, or a...
Humorous single paragraph sentence? The original Winnie the Pooh provides such a thing here. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples as well, but this is the only one that presented itself to m...
Your goal with any tale of horror is to inspire just that in your readers: horror. In order for them to feel it though, the people they care about - the protagonist and main characters - must also ...
Is using colons and/or semicolons in dialogue awkward? No. Using them is fine. To me at least, every one of the above quotes looks perfectly natural. I agree that trying to find another way to writ...
Pack of Playing Cards? Some might associate this with Poker and Casinos, but it would receive a lot less heat than a pack of cigarettes I believe. Really though, all you need to do is think of th...
In Donald Maass's book Writing the Breakout Novel, he talks about stakes. He goes over how a breakout novel needs two kinds: personal stakes - what the hero could lose - and public stakes - what th...
