Posts by Thomas Myron
First off, 'platform' might not be the best word. I am talking about what you construct a website with, as in Wordpress, vbulletin, etc. I can't seem to find what these are called. I will use the w...
What you are talking about is called a Dark Protagonist. Short Answer: Yes. This is possible, if handled correctly. If handled incorrectly, your main character will fail and take the book with h...
This is a question that doesn't directly apply to me, though I can easily see myself having this problem. I thought I'd run writer's block for a loop and find the answer before the problem arose. :...
Here and there I've been hearing about what readers 'expect' from certain genres. Romance readers expect the hero and heroine to wind up together. Fantasy readers expect epic fantasy full of battle...
I am not a published author, though I am nearing that stage. This is because I decided many years ago to learn all I could about writing, and hone my skill with practice, before actually writing my...
Hi hebbo and welcome to Writers SE! Generally asking what to write is off topic, but I think this is an exception, because it is actually a common problem in writing (at least for me). It's not a n...
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...
You capitalize The if: It begins a sentence. It is part of the name. So if the inn is The Cloak and Dagger Inn, everything is capitalized (except the and of course). If the name is the Cloak...
and welcome to the site. I do not know of any novels that follow the format you are describing, but that is a good thing. I believe one of the reasons World War Z stood out from the mass of zombi...
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...
There is one rule in writing from which everything else stems: you write for the reader. However, from that rule, you can deduce that if you turn out a novel that you know could have been better, y...
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, ...
I always feel that a book or movie has achieved something great when I have an emotional reaction to it. For a very brief moment, the protagonist's pain, drive, happiness, or shock becomes my own. ...
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...
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...
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 ...
In the second book of his Inheritence Cycle, Christopher Paolini makes the grievous error of landing his main character in the middle of a serene woodland where he must sit and talk with an old elf...
