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Activity for F1Krazy‭

Type On... Excerpt Status Date
Answer A: What is the effect on the young reader when there is no "Happy Ending" in a story for children?
Three words: Bridge to Terabithia. Every single time I have heard someone mention this book (or the film based on it), it's been in the context of how much they were traumatised by its ending as a child. A more personal example (since I've never seen/read Bridge to Terabithia myself) would be the Ni...
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about 6 years ago
Answer A: How long should a memoir be?
How long should a memoir be? The same length as any other piece of prose: exactly as long as it needs to be to tell the story you want to tell. No more, no less. Don't feel like you have to omit any important details to avoid your memoir being too long, and don't feel like you have to pad it out with...
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about 6 years ago
Answer A: How to avoid pages of dialogue?
> How can I avoid such long 'walls' of one-sided dialogue... You don't need to. My writing style is naturally very conversational, especially in my more "slice-of-life"-esque stories: characters will sit/stand around talking to each other for pages at a time. One of them has a character deliver an e...
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about 6 years ago
Answer A: How to invest readers in a story that (initially) has no clear direction?
What I would personally do in this situation is a "How We Got Here" scenario. Start off towards the climax of your story, with the protagonist facing down (or preparing to face down) whatever the final antagonist happens to be. This will solve your problem of introducing the antagonist and the long-...
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about 6 years ago
Answer A: Writing diversity
Diversity is not, and should not be, a box-ticking exercise. If you're inserting minority characters just for the sake of having them there, you're doing it wrong. To address your specific questions: > Is it a problem is some group such-and-such remains unrepresented? Nope. I am a firm believer ...
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about 6 years ago
Answer A: Is there any way to get around having everyone in the world speak the same language?
You can work around the language barrier the same way we do in real life: have someone act as a translator. There are three ways of introducing such a character: - Option 1: The moment the need for a translator arises, one of your characters randomly sticks his hand up and goes, "Oh, I speak languag...
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about 6 years ago
Answer A: If I am writing from the first-person perspective of a non-English speaker in first person, what should I do?
I see no reason you would do anything differently than if you were writing about an English-speaking character. I'm English. I can't speak any language other than English. But as a massive anime nerd, I have several stories - including one in first-person - that take place in Japan, with Japanese-sp...
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about 6 years ago
Answer A: How to handle a massive info dump post-ending?
Expanding my comment into a full answer as OP indicated it was helpful. > I can’t drag the antagonist into a Poirot/Sherlock Holmes style Q&A as he's already in jail. Sure you can. Just have the protagonist, or some other major character, visit the antagonist in jail and hold the Q&A session th...
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over 6 years ago
Answer A: Can I keep my characters in my book or should I just give up with them?
> A few years ago I was like 13 and I posted some characters I made up and I really love them. If the stolen characters are still recognisably the same characters from that post, then you have incontrovertible, time-stamped proof that you are their original creator. If you still have screenshots of ...
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over 6 years ago
Answer A: How do you handle violence in a story with a female as the main villian?
To quote Batman: "The hammer of justice is unisex." Your hero isn't fighting the villain because she's a woman. He's fighting her because she's a villain. And since she isn't a femme fatale who uses her gender to her advantage, her gender is ultimately completely irrelevant to her conflict with the ...
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over 6 years ago
Answer A: How can a main character learn about a secret event that will take place?
A couple of other ideas that haven't been suggested yet: - The protagonist gets lucky. He's off chasing an unrelated (or seemingly unrelated) lead or clue, and just happens to stumble across evidence of the impending delivery: financial records, an overheard mook conversation, or even the actual del...
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over 6 years ago
Answer A: To read or not to read similar works before write my own?
In my experience: absolutely. Back in 2016 I started writing (very slowly) an anime-inspired romantic dramedy about a 30-year-old NEET whose life has fallen apart. A few months ago I was alerted to the existence of Net-juu no Susume, a romcom anime about a 30-year-old NEET whose life has fallen apar...
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over 6 years ago
Answer A: I’m considering adding a flashback to my script. Are they so bad?
I can think of at least two detective shows - Without A Trace and Cold Case - that do this multiple times per episode, as part of their general structure. As long as it's made clear that it's a flashback (for example, a fade-to-white transition before and afterwards), I don't see any problem with you...
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over 6 years ago
Answer A: The Good, the Bad, and the Semicolon
I myself have been criticised on at least one occasion for using too many semicolons in my writing. I hadn't noticed at the time, but I really was overusing them. It's one of the quirks of my writing style that I now try and consciously tone down, along with starting dialogue paragraphs with "the cha...
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over 6 years ago
Answer A: How to make stock death speech great again?
As you said yourself, that kind of cliched dying monologue just isn't taken seriously anymore. I can't even take the big dramatic slow-motion "NOOOOOOO"s seriously anymore (see: Wonder Woman). So if you really want to have a character say something like "I'm so cold... I don't want to go...", then pl...
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over 6 years ago
Answer A: Is it wrong if I kill off a black character?
I had the same dilemma recently with one of my older stories (i.e. 6-7 years old), which is in need of redrafting. One of the supporting characters, a black woman, dies halfway through; this is a pivotal moment in the plot, as it drives the (white male) protagonist to make a decision that drives the ...
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over 6 years ago
Question How to avoid constantly starting paragraphs with "The character did this" "The character did that"?
This is one of the tics I've noticed in my writing recently, and it's starting to bug me. Almost every single one of my paragraphs, particularly during dialogue sequences, starts with "The character did this". The main exceptions are when I use "'Quote', attribution, 'continuance'" instead. Here's a...
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over 6 years ago
Answer A: Where to put character responses in dialog?
The convention is to always start a new paragraph when you change the speaker, change the place, or change the time. In this case, you're changing the speaker, so your first example is correct. In the second example it's unclear who's saying the second line - it could be Jack, or it could be Jill or ...
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over 6 years ago
Answer A: How to keep it interesting before the inciting incident?
I'm going to use the example of one of my all-time favourite anime, Steins;Gate, which also has two inciting incidents. The first is Okabe accidentally inventing the time machine and shifting himself into a parallel World Line. This occurs midway through Episode 1, though he and the audience don't r...
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over 6 years ago
Answer A: The use of short, concise sentences to suggest a withdrawn character
I like this idea. I was actually planning to use a similar technique in one of my own stories at once point. To address the bullet points in your question: > It may be jarring to the reader. It can be awkward, uncomfortable to read. In this instance, I think that's a good thing. The character herse...
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over 6 years ago
Answer A: Weaving VERY IMPORTANT OPINIONS into a story without murdering it
There's nothing wrong with weaving your personal opinions into your writing. The trick is to be subtle about it. The reason Assigned Male Comics is... not exactly well-received, to say the least... is because it has absolutely no concept of subtlety. It's so heavy-handed with its message of trans ac...
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over 6 years ago
Answer A: Chessmaster type characters?
To add to Mikailo's excellent answer, another character you should definitely look at is Sora from No Game No Life: he has both the chessmaster intellect and the foolish, goofy personality. In particular, watch the episode with the shiritori game, which combines both those elements to spectacular eff...
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almost 7 years ago
Answer A: Can I use prominent people in history to as characters in my fiction?
Sure you can! People do it all the time. To use your own example of Abraham Lincoln, there was a film from a few years ago (adapted from some other medium) depicting him as a part-time vampire hunter. It was imaginatively titled Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, wove fictional events together with r...
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almost 7 years ago
Answer A: Ways to replace "Then, ..."
As the other answers have noted, you can rewrite the sentences to remove the need for "then" (or possibly just omit it without any rewriting at all). However, there are also a few synonyms you can use, allowing you to keep the sense of narrative flow you're after without the frequent repetition of "t...
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almost 7 years ago
Answer A: How do I represent two computers having a conversation between themselves that other characters are unaware of?
I'd say that whether you need a voiceover reading out the messages or not depends on how long the conversation goes on for. In the example you gave - Sherlock - the text conversations rarely last for more than about two or three replies, and if they do, they're usually punctuated by other characters...
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almost 7 years ago
Answer A: Is it okay to have a character that has the same first or last name as another famous character
The problem you're describing actually has an associated TV Trope: the One Mario Limit ( obligatory warning , now that I've added a link). Some names become so strongly associated with one character/person, that any other characters/people with the same name will inevitably be compared with them. Mar...
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about 7 years ago
Answer A: The protagonist can't defeat the antagonist without the antagonist being stupid
-WARNING: TV TROPES LINK SPAM INCOMING- There's nothing at all wrong with having your villain make a stupid mistake. Villains do it all the time. A better question is why your villain would make such a stupid mistake in the first place. Here's a few suggestions: He's arrogant. - "Why should I bot...
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about 7 years ago
Answer A: What is a good way to name characters?
Here's a list of various techniques I use when it comes to naming characters: The lazy approach Pick the first good name that comes into your head. Simple. I do this for a lot of minor or one-shot characters, where it's not worth going into much detail trying to think of a better name (something @h...
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about 7 years ago