Activity for Galastel
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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A: Fan Fiction: a crutch or a good start? I don't know if Fanfic is a crutch or useful practice, but it is fun. For me, writing fanfic is one of the ways I enjoy a book. So I'd do it whether it's useful or not. That said, can writing fanfic be useful? - Fanfic allows you to engage in "what if" scenarios: what if Frodo and Sam were lovers, ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to address family members solely by relationship in dialogue? If you are writing the story, you face a choice between making the dialogue more natural, or emphasising foreignness. @Amadeus explains the first option in detail, so I will not reiterate. However, it is possible that you don't want the dialogue to be that natural: your POV character might be, for so... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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The advantages and disadvantages of Fantasy-time Many works of the High Fantasy genre are set in a pseudo-European fantasyland, in a rather amorphous time-period that mixes early-medieval and late-medieval arms and armour (but never gunpowder), late Renaissance society structure, and civilian technology that's everything before steam. Of particular... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Are connotations with certain names inevitable? While names have connotations, those are, most of the time, different connotations for different people. Hearing the name 'Brad' one person can think of Brad Pitt, another of Brad who bullied them at school, and yet another - of their best friend Brad. You cannot account for every association a reade... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: To what extent can a first person narrative tell someone else's story? The most famous example of what you're describing is Sherlock Holmes, told of course from Dr. Watson's POV. Watson never becomes the protagonist of the story - the focus is always on Holmes, Watson serving merely as his "biographer". What Watson's perspective gives us is the incredulity at Homes's co... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to survive editing I'm generally much more messy with my editing than @Fayth85, (I mean, I do not have a procedure, an order of editing things - I just take care of whatever doesn't feel right,) and I do quite a bit of editing while I'm writing (it's how I deal with writing block), but here are some things that have he... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is it important to describe every character of the storyline? Remember your own days at school? Some people you knew well - they were your friends. Some you didn't know so well - classmates you weren't close with. Perhaps there were the people you didn't get along with: you probably didn't know why they were like that, you just knew their unpleasant trait, and ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is writing big facts about a character's background good when first introducing them? There are many styles of story-telling. Consider, for example, the start of the Lord of the Rings: > Bilbo was very rich and very peculiar, and had been the wonder of the Shire for sixty years, ever since his remarkable disappearance and unexpected return. The riches he had brought back from his tra... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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Colloquial speech in pre-modern setting Following this question, I'm struggling with writing the speech of pre-modern (in my case - 5th century) noble-born children among themselves. Characters who are well-educated would not be making grammatical mistakes and would not be mispronouncing words (in fact, you can expect them to speak the lo... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Researching Future Technology for a Science Fiction Novel The search term you're looking for is " Emerging technology". Focus on the field(s) that are of interest to you, since there are too many technologies to keep track of everything. Read up on the technologies that look interesting. You can also look into what futurologists write, since it's their job... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How can you make an unrealistic setup as realistic as possible? Any "what if" scenario is where your creativity must come to bear. It is for you, as a writer, to consider the questions you ask. The first step is indeed asking the questions. Then you find an answer that seems good to you. An important element is being internally consistent. The rules of your fant... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is it a flaw if a book is readable, flows well, and gets the point across, BUT you can tell that the author is a non-native? I sometimes notice that a work of literature has been written by an immigrant. It's not just the sentences - it's something in the underlying world-view, the imagery, the way different things are given attention. I love this effect, and go looking for it. Why? Because I find the different POV of the... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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"Too modern" words In a story set in a fantasy version of 5th century Persia, I've been told by a beta reader that a boy wouldn't call his father "dad", (would use "father" instead), wouldn't say "no spoilers", etc. I am somewhat confused by this: a boy in 5th century Persia wouldn't be speaking English, and wouldn't ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Occupational Hazards to being a Full-Time Writer If I were a rich man, all day long I'd sit and write. To elaborate: - What do you eat while you're writing your first novel? - Did you manage to get your first novel published? - What do you eat until the novel gets published? - Once the novel has been published and you're seeing some money from it... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is my book too similar to Harry Potter? " I am writing a story about a boy and a girl who are in love, but can't be together. Is my story too similar to Romeo and Juliet?" See what I mean? Many stories share similarities. If one story is about a school, it doesn't mean that no story ever again can be about a school. If one story is about ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Making similies and metaphors work as intended > Similes are like the Reddit 50/50 challenge: you either get something very good, or your eyes will melt off. This is an example of the second variety. ;) Several things need to be true of a simile in order for it to have a chance: - The two things in question need to actually be similar in the w... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to write dialogue for someone who is intelligent but barely speaks the language? Two years ago I took a course with a new professor in our university - a fresh immigrant from the US, who had to teach in Hebrew. Said professor is one of the most brilliant researchers at our faculty, so "intelligent character" - covered. How did he speak? First there was the accent. 'Heavy' doesn'... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to defeat a strategic mastermind without throwing the idiotball? There are several ways a strategic mastermind can be realistically defeated. - A mastermind can only take into account what he knows of. The opposing side can come up with new technology or new magic, that changes the situation. Consider, for example Japan in WW2: leaving aside whether their strateg... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Dead as a point-of-view, how can you write first person narrative if that person is dead? There should be a jolt when the main character dies, in fact when any character the readers sympathise with dies. Now, what to do with the first-person narration and the death? One option, is to narrate right on until the death, as usual, then cut off. Depending on the metaphysics of your story, it... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to make characters more than the words on the page? In my mind's eye, the characters I write about are "real people": I do not ask myself what I want them to do. I ask myself what they would do in the given situation. I know their fears and their desires and their quirks, I know how they would respond to events, what they would want to say in a situat... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Executing a tonal shift One of the best examples that come to my mind of executing a tonal shift is Catch 22. It starts hilariously funny, mocking all the absurdities of the military. Then the same elements are revisited again and again, only they become darker each time, until what is left is the horror of war. For example... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is it possible to pass down the privilege for choosing articles from teachers to students for school magazine? Who are the readers of your magazine? The students? Imagine then, that you get a subscription to some journal. However, instead of providing you with carefully selected, edited and reviewed content, the journal sends you all the hundreds of raw submissions they get, and asks you to read through all ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Mentioning quickly repeated events in first person? In your first example, you allow the reader to experience, together with the character, the waiting for an answer and the wondering why nobody opens the door. Each time your character knocks, there's waiting, anticipation, build-up of tension. In your second example, you gloss over those experiments.... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to make a repeating plot "slice" not annoying In real-life warfare, number of wounded normally exceeds significantly the number of fatalities. Which is good. There is, however, far more going on when a soldier is wounded than "get him into cover". Consider field surgery under fire. Consider triage (that's when your medic needs to decide which o... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Making an existential horror work without really showing it In essence, you're asking how to convey dread of a past event, past threat. There are several ways to do that. Elders shaking in fear at the mere mention of "threat" is cheap. It can be used in conjunction with other elements, but not on its own, and not as your main mode of conveying the threat. Y... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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Using profanity I'm working on a war novel (sci-fi). My initial plan was for my MC to start out with a very clean language, almost comically clean, and as the plot progresses and the situation gets more FUBAR, his language would get more colourful. Other characters were to use different levels of profanity, based on... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Writing Unequal Societies (Without Supporting Inequality) Historically, occidental cultures were not as biased against women as you might think. Look, for example, at this source on trial by combat between men and women. It suggests that at least some women learnt how to fight, and were able to do so. Furthermore, a noblewoman in the middle ages would be ad... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How do I know which elements I can use from the work which orginally inspired me? There are many examples of stories set in a post-apocalyptic space-faring human civilisation, with different takes on the idea. Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern, even the computer game Mass Effect - Andromeda fall under this broad description, and yet are comple... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What should my redraft phase entail? Going over a draft the first time around, I look for the things that really don't work, things that stick out like a sore thumb. Those might be issues with the flow, internal contradictions and inconsistencies, things a character wouldn't say, wording, etc. Sometimes, I see straight away how to corr... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Death as person - A funny part of the story? Or serious stuff? Anthropomorphic personifications of death are quite old, and the older ones focus on the frightening aspects of death. Look, for example, at Oscar Wilde's The Young King: > From the darkness of a cavern Death and Avarice watched them, and Death said, ‘I am weary; give me a third of them and let me g... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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How to write a story without conflict, like "My Neighbour Totoro"? We are used to stories being about conflict. There can be an antagonist, or a hostile environment, or even an internal problem (like depression), but conflict is there. The story arc involves dealing with some problem or other and growing in the process. But think of My Neighbour Totoro. No conflict... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Does everything have to be accurate? Generally, @MichaelKjörling and @HenryTaylor are right. Let me, however, look at the issue from a slightly different perspective. If you explain something, it has to make sense. If you don't explain, it can be accepted as a black box. Consider, for example, Asimov's Robot series. The robots have a ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: I have characters, no plot You've got characters, you've got a world. What you need is conflict : it is conflict that makes a story. This can be conflict between characters, conflict with some other force ("antagonist" or nature), even internal conflict. Your characters want something, and for some reason they can't have it - ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is mild sexualization of minors allowed in writing? It is absolutely certainly legal for what you describe to appear in literature. Consider, for instance, that Juliet was 14 when she married and had sex with Romeo. A more modern example: Song of Ice and Fire; Daenerys is 13 when she is married off to Khal Drogo, with their sex receiving multiple desc... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How does one include non-Latin-based script in an overall English work? Transliteration is commonly used in cases such as you describe. Look for example at Ken Liu's short story Mono no aware: the title itself is a transliteration. Then, within the text, there is an explanation: > “Everything passes, Hiroto,” Dad said. “That feeling in your heart: It’s called mono no a... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to revise your "setting bible" Let me second what @ItWasLikeThatWhenIGotHere says, and elaborate. Fiddling with a setting is an endless task : you can delve into sociology, millennia of history, technology, geography, geology - all the endless scientific endeavour thousands of RL scientists are trying to figure out with our real,... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Can I assign actions to broad concepts? Your teacher is quite wrong, I believe. "People who do science" don't help you with anything. Maybe one of them sits down and explains things to you, but another is this unfriendly power-hungry schmuck who abuses students and sticks his name on top of their findings, while yet another falsifies exper... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What is the structure and important points to cover in a first chapter? I would point you towards How to open a novel? Extending the answers to that question from "first page" to "first chapter", I'd say the first chapter should give us an idea of what the story is going to feel like: what the setting is, what kind of problems the characters can expect to face, whether t... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is it Ok to make up places if I want the reader to think it’s set in the real world? Jane Austen routinely did what it sounds like you want to do: she kept the big places intact (London, Bath), but the estates mentioned in her stories (e.g. Pemberly) are fictional, with only their general location given. The estate was fictional, but culturally it was set in its time, in England, whi... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is it acceptable to use words like "heaven" and "god" when the narrator is agnostic? There are two ways religious concepts appear in speech. First, there are common expressions: "Oh my god", "go to hell", etc. Those are a natural part of our speech, we hear them all the times and do not give them much consideration. An agnostic or an atheist is likely to use them the same way, witho... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What makes for a successful resurrection? In writing a resurrection, you need to balance several conflicting ideas: on the one hand, the death of the character should be a possibility. Otherwise, this death is cheap, meaningless. "He died, so what? He's going to come back." The last thing you want to evoke with a character's death is boredom... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Should I take breaks, or focus harder? Here's a question you must answer to yourself: what is writing to you? Is it a hobby, a pastime, something you enjoy but do not take too seriously? Do you aspire to achieve anything in this field (e.g.. publish a story)? Is it your art, your voice - does the story burn like a fire in your bones? Who ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Should I focus on ideas which the market enjoys, or ideas which I enjoy? From your either-or phrasing, I understand that you're asking whether you should write something that appears "hot", but that you personally find utterly boring. How then do you propose to write such a thing? Do you see yourself sitting there, putting drivel on a page, fighting off boredom and disgus... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Cutting down story length without leaving out locations It's a bit hard to give advise with so little information to base it on, but if your story is about the characters rather than the locations, and your problem is that it takes the characters to meet in the first place, couldn't they all (or at least some of them) meet at some event outside their plac... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Fantasy novel with obvious - but never defined - sci-fi elements? Mixing sci-fi elements into a mostly fantasy story has been done before. For example, Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern starts out as a typical fantasy series, and then turns out to have also been sci-fi all along (humans have come to a planet, bio-engineered dragons...). Robert Jordan's Wheel of... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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Brands to use, brands not to use Inspired by GGx's question Will traditional publishers force you to remove brands? I would probably not want to mention a brand name of a small brand in my work: a small brand might not want to be associated with a fictional work because of suspected endorsement, and might get replaced next year by ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Will traditional publishers force you to remove brands? Publishers certainly don't always remove brands. Two example from Jim Butcher's Dresden Files: > "I'm hungry," he said, his voice a low growl. > "We can hit a McDonald's or something on the way home," I suggested. (Jim Butcher, Dead Beat, chapter 12 and > “Right,” Thomas said. “Where are we head... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is it important to research the topic of your novel/story before writing it? Your question can be read in two ways: are you talking of stage magic, or of a fantasy world with actual working magic? If you are writing about stage magic, you should very definitely do your research: existing stage tricks and how they're done, industry practices, etc. This isn't to say that you c... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to organically and believably introduce the tools and skills necessary to survive after an apocalypse? Let me start personal. My family has been in situations where a group of people found themselves unprepared for survival, lacking both the knowledge and the infrastructure to survive, lacking help from outside (the outside trying to kill them). I had family exiled from warm Lithuania to a penal colon... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Sensory Information Overload @Amadeus and @DPT both provide great answers. I will add one consideration to their answers, an aspect @DPT mentions, but doesn't elaborate on. It's not just how much description you have, how many senses are engaged, how many adjectives are used. Ultimately, your description needs to paint one conc... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |