Activity for Galastel
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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A: Introducing a character in the third act? If a character appears in the third act and helps solve a major problem the main characters have carried for the two previous acts, that character is sort of deus ex machina - something previously entirely unforeseen comes and solves the problem. If a character appears in the third act and makes new... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Are friendly writing contests a useful exercise? As I recall, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Horace Smith, and whoever else their friends were, used to challenge each other to write things. Quite a few novels and poems came out of those friendly contests. A writing challenge forces you to step out of your comfort zone, stretch your creat... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: What is the effect on the young reader when there is no "Happy Ending" in a story for children? King Matt the First is very explicitly written for seven-year-olds. It's about a seven-years-old prince, whose father dies, so he becomes king. He tries to be a good king, but there's a war, and he's defeated, and ends up being exiled. There's a sequel - in its end, he dies in a factory accident. I... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Non-trope happy ending? Easiest example where not all protagonists find "someone else" is The Lord of the Rings. Of the nine members of the Fellowship, Aragorn and Sam are the only ones who marry within the course of the novel. Merry and Pippin are mentioned in the appendixes to have found wives later, but that is not part ... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Creating or identifying secondary protagonists Like @Rasdashan, I am a discovery writer. My characters take shape as I write. You might find that this approach works for you too. That said, since you wish to write about a group of characters, you might want to look into group dynamics, and various party structures. Here is my answer to a questio... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Showing mass murder in a kid's book You have two problems here: 1. Lots of good people dying, "on stage" - in front of the children 2. Good people killing other good people The first is dealt with very well in The Hobbit, for example. > Already behind [Thorin] among the goblin dead lay many men and many dwarves, and many a fair ... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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Mortal danger in mid-grade literature In a comment to my post here, Cyn mentions wishing to avoid implying that the characters might all die, because she's writing for a mid-grade audience. Which made me wonder. I remember reading The Hobbit when I was nine or ten - in the mid-grade range. There's danger there - the orcs, the dragon, t... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Best practice for academic writing: write and cite or write first? "Write and cite" is good practice that you should start getting accustomed to early on. The longer the piece you write, the more sources you would have to juggle. Now, imagine there are twenty articles you would be citing, four of them say something relevant to the point you're making in one single p... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: What if your narrator’s profession is author and she wants to include her writing process/specific chapters as part of her story? It is not unusual for the main character, or the POV character (not necessarily the same thing) to be a writer. There's even a trope for this: Most Writers are Writers (tvtropes link). A famous example is Dr. Zhivago. Zhivago is an aspiring poet and novelist. Throughout the novel, we read excerpts f... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Symbolism of 18 Journeyers You've said it yourself: 18 = life. It follows that had there only been 17 travellers, they would not have come home alive. Preferably every child, but particularly the stowaway, must have a crucial role to play. Otherwise, they're not necessary, right? You could play more with the idea. Your 18 tra... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Writing in a Christian voice Growing up in Israel, I am surrounded by Jews. Interacting with Christian acquaintances, and reading literature written by religious Christians, there are a few things I noticed - things that stood out to me as not being what is to me "the norm". (This is not an exhaustive study. Those are broad gene... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: What should tie a collection of short-stories together? In an interview that I can't find now, Neil Gaiman stated that the short stories in his latest collection Trigger Warning had one element tying them together: they were all the short stories he had written since the last collection. He said that when people came to him and talked about themes explore... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How can I make a non-linear timeline less confusing? Tolkien dealt with exactly the same situation in The Lord of the Rings, starting with the breaking of the Fellowship. For example, we have simultaneously Merry and Pippin being carried by orcs; Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli chasing same orcs; Frodo and Sam getting lost in the Emyn Muil. The way Tolkien... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Describing a chess game in a novel Your story must be perfectly readable and understandable by people who do not play chess, do not know the rules, and only know through pop-culture osmosis that there are pieces called 'rook', 'knight', etc. Write with that in mind. With that in mind, I probably wouldn't use chess notation at all. So... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How far I can write about a protagonist with a different ethnicity of me? Let's explore the proposition you're making here. You're saying "a white person cannot know what it's like to be black. Ergo, a white person should not write about black characters." So, white writers should exclude black people from their stories? That's rather racist, isn't it? The opposite of your... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How specific should I get when brainstorming with what-if exercise? Not a direct answer to "how specific", but a technique you might find useful not to get bogged down in details: instead of writing a list, make it a tree. In your example, "writer", "actor", "programmer" are all children of "talent". "Talent", on the other hand, is the only child node of "doesn't wa... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How to write cleanly even if my character uses expletive language? Each usage has its place. #1 is most commonly used in such situations. Even if you're not writing for children, you don't necessarily want every bit of cursing. Sometimes telling that the character used a strong word is enough, or even more effective, than actually spelling out what exactly he said.... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Does it really serve a main character to give them one driving want? I think it's like this: a normal person wants a lot of things: a new car, a raise, sex, some peace and quiet... When something dramatic happens, a person suddenly realises what's really important in their life. It sort of crystallises, and everything else becomes less important. For example, if ther... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: What points should a "Character Interview" method for character building hit? Expanding on what I said in a comment to @Amadeus's post, I don't like thinking of "talking" with my character as an interview. A character might not want to answer a journalist, an interrogator, even a doctor. But a character would open up to a friend. So, "a trusted friend" is how I position myself... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Rules about breaking the rules. How do I do it well? Neil Gaiman, making a commencement speech in the University of the Arts in 2012, said the following: > When you start out on a career in the arts you have no idea what you are doing. > > This is great. People who know what they are doing know the rules, and know what is possible and impossible. You... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: What challenges are there in writing a fantasy cookbook? In essence, you've got two elements to balance: the fantasy, and the cooking. So let's look at them separately first. Cooking: - The recipes need to work. Recipes that mean nothing can be a fun gimmick on the internet, but if you're selling a cookbook, it should be a cookbook, no matter how it's st... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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How to open a serious speech? I need to speak at the unveiling of a memorial plaque (this one, incidentally). I have an idea of what I want to say, and how I want to arrange it. My struggle is with the opening. I have spoken in public before - in academic settings, on fantasy/sci-fi conventions. In all those circumstances, my g... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How to make readers know that my work has used a hidden constraint? You do not. Nowhere in Green Eggs and Ham does Dr. Seuss tell you that the whole thing is written using exactly 50 different words. It's an "Easter Egg" as @Alexander points out in a comment. It's for readers to notice, or learn about from others having noticed. An Easter egg is fun because the rea... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: My story is written in English, but is set in my home country. What language should I use for the dialogue? You have read books like this, or at least are familiar with books like this: Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls is set in Spain, and it is indicated, repeatedly, that the dialogue is in Spanish, in fact in a particular dialect of Spanish. The main character's accent is even discussed. But t... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: What to call a nameless character in a 3rd person narrative? More than one author has struggled with the same problem before. There is a Russian children's story about a dog named 'Shoo' - the dog has been shooed so many times, that by the time it was adopted, it thought 'Shoo' was it's name. The most famous example of what you're trying to do, and one you're... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How can we incorporate poems in a novel? You have been misinformed: The Lord of the Rings doesn't have short poems at the start of each chapter. The Lord of the Rings has poems of various length (up to several pages long), when characters sing, recite poems, or find them written somewhere. Characters may sing on varied occasions: there are... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How does one describe somebody who is bi-racial to someone who is blind? Where I live, belonging to two-three ethnic groups is the norm. Children in school boast about being a quarter Iraqi, a quarter Moroccan, a quarter Polac and a quarter old Jerusalemi. How does one describe people when that's the situation? One forgets ethnicities (since by this point, they affect th... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Does misspelling words for the sake of bad English improve the immersion or distract the reader? A point that has not been touched on in any of the other answers: for some of your readers, English is not their first language. Such readers, if they don't know English very well, would wonder if that word you're using is an English word they don't know, or something you've made up. They would try t... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How do I say that someone is black? A few points, in no particular order: - "A black man" paints a very different picture from "an elderly black gentleman" or "a tall, black-skinned young man". In the first case, the skin colour is the only thing the narrator sees about the man. That's a bit disconcerting if you look at it like that. ... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How do we tell someone how to sing a lyric? Lyrics are not lyrics until they are set to music. At which point, they are sung to the music. They appear on the sheet music. Like so:  (source) Alternatively, the lyrics can be placed not over sheet music, but over guitar chords,... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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Help! My Character is too much for her story! A while ago, I started writing a short story for a competition. It was supposed to be about four girls in a shared student apartment. The plan was to have everyone conflict with everyone until they united against a common enemy (the landlord or the exams - I haven't reached that far), and learnt to p... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Is there a way to break genre expectations successfully? I don't think readers are as conservative regarding genre as you make them out to be. Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber is one very well known example of fantasy, with no elves, no dragons, and a rather unique approach to magic. I believe the problem is rather with subverting the expectations you ... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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How do I write for the majority, without alienating my minority? This is something of a companion question to How does one write from a minority culture? A question on cultural references I have recently had a somewhat unpleasant experience reading Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver. (Loved the book, but still.) My first response upon meeting the Jewish protagonist wa... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Translating non-English lyrics to English A song has lyrics and music. Translating the lyrics, you'd want to keep the music. It means that as you're translating, you'd have to try to sing each line to the original music. The beats would have to fall in the same places. There are other auditory elements you might want to preserve, or at leas... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How do we write a story about genocide committed by a fascist government without falling into the "Nazi Germany" cliché? You need to distinguish allegory and applicability. Tolkien wrote on the subject: > I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author. Any time you write about genocide, it would be applica... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Distinguishing between unreliable frame narrator and narrator of framed story In The Neverending Story, Michael Ende faces a somewhat similar challenge: the main character, Bastian, gets his hands on a book, and the narrative alternates between the book Bastian is reading, and his own actions - his thoughts with regards to the book, his more mundane actions with regards to ski... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Casually inserting sexual orientation Your MC has never met a living soul, per your statement. This would mean that she doesn't know who she's attracted to - not until she's met them, and experienced attraction. She meets a guy, she's attracted to him. At this point, she only knows that she's attracted to him. She doesn't know if she's ... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: how can I showcase the internal struggles between a man and his demons? Others have said Internal Dialogue, and I second that. But let me also offer an alternative. If the "demon" is a sufficiently separate entity that the character can talk to it, negotiate with it, argue with it, that's easy. The demon is then like another character, it just happens to reside in the fi... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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End-of-line hyphenation - how should it be used? End-of-line hyphenation is the process of breaking words between lines to create more consistency across a text block. (source) A long word is broken across a line-break by means of a hyphen. It helps justify a text, along letter spacing and kerning. A word processors can do this automatically, if on... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Should we avoid writing fiction about historical events without extensive research? Some events are far-off historical events. The most you risk if you write about them without doing the proper research is making a fool of yourself. Other events are still within living memory. Some of your readers might have lived the event. @SaraCosta says in the comment that not doing research is... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How do we write a good feedback as a beta-reader? The answer would greatly depend on who you're beta-reading for, and what they ask you for. One writer might have specific questions they'd want you to answer. Another would just ask for your impression. One might want to hear your opinion (in person, or on the phone), another might want it written d... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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What should the omniscient narrator call a character? Let there be a character. Let the character's name be, for example, Alexander. Now, Alexander's parents call him 'Sasha'. His friends call him 'Xander'. His girlfriend calls him 'Alex'. In formal circumstances, he's 'Alexander, son of Philipp'. To himself, he is all of those - they are, after all, v... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How do we spread a story across several different media without alienating our readers? What @linksassin says is a good approach, but it's not necessarily the only approach. Sometimes, one medium is the "main story", while the others are "supplementary material". This is the approach taken by Bioware, and several other strong videogame companies: the main story is in the games, while co... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Naming things the POV character doesn't know There is an alternative that I see to the proposed answers. You can in fact use the proper names of items. Here's how. The first time the children encounter something they are unfamiliar with, they might ask what it is, or your narrator might go > they did not know it at the time, but found out lat... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Should an author include user-interactive sections in his website? If your website allows interaction - leaving comments etc., there is the hidden implication that someone on your behalf keeps an eye on those interaction, at least to the extent of keeping things civil, if not to the extent of answering questions like "when is the next book coming out" and "why did y... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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Sometimes a banana is just a banana Often reading analyses of books and films, I find that the analytics derive conclusions from the specific food or beverage that a character consumes. The food appears to always be symbolic of something. Now, I'm not completely oblivious to what food says about a character. But here's the problem: in... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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Map-making software I'm looking for free software, preferably open-source, that would allow me to create maps for my story. I guess what I need is a tool that would allow some measure of 3D modeling. Features I would very much like: - Fiddling with elevation - Drawing rivers, and making sure they don't do silly things... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How do we succintly describe a boxing match? Do the particular details of the boxing match matter to the story? What details matter? Why do they matter? Surely not every single punch and block is of utmost importance? If I were describing a fencing match (something I understand far better than boxing, so you will forgive me if I focus on that... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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Everyone is beautiful I've noticed a quirk with the narrator voice of one of the two novels I'm working on. This narrator only describes the beautiful aspects of every character's features. You might think the women are all beautiful, the men are all handsome - this one has beautiful eyes, that one moves like a swan - a w... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Knowing when to use pictures over words First, always include a picture of the finished product. It helps me, as the customer, realise what it is they're trying to achieve, it helps me see whether my intermediary stage is in the right direction, or completely not. It also makes me drool and want to make and eat that particular recipe. With... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |