Activity for Galastel
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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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 |
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A: Should I write a companion book/blog? A companion book - it's way too early to think of that. There's no sense in writing a companion book when you haven't written the main book yet. A companion to what would it be? Once you've published your story, if it sells well, there might be a market for a companion book with additional informatio... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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Every character has a name - does this lead to too many named characters? My tendency when writing is to give every character a name. Even the most minor ones. It says something about a nobleman when he knows every guard and stablehand by name, and it's something I want. So it's never "a guard" - it's always "Sergeant such-and-such". Another effect that I like is that of... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Should I include an appendix to reference words of an in-universe language for a fantasy novel? A "dictionary" for your fantasy language should never be needed by the reader. If the reader has to learn a language, or flip back and forth to a dictionary, the flow of the reading is broken every time, reading becomes too much "work", and chances are the reader would drop your book. Thus, every ti... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Injecting creativity into a cookbook Your cookbook's primary function is being a reference book: providing clear recipes. My personal preference is to always have a picture of the final product, and preferably also intermediary stages, especially if the process is complicated. Everything else, every bit of writing creativity, is seconda... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Write for an audience or find an audience for your writing? Let me expand on @Cyn's answer. Tolkien wrote for himself. He was sure there would never be an audience for the Silamrillion, and was surprised by the wide acclaim of The Lord of the Rings. So were the critics, by the way. What happened is, Tolkien wanted to read a certain thing. Because it wasn't t... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Writing a character who is going through a civilizing process without overdoing it? There is a surviving account of the first meeting between Portuguese sailors and Japanese locals. What's interesting about it is that accounts of the meeting survived from both sides. The accounts go something like this: > Japanese account: Those barbarians! They eat with their hands! > > Portugues... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Making him into a bully (how to show mild violence) The scariest bully, I think, is not the one who beats you. A punch only hurts for a short while. T he scariest bully is the one who humiliates you in front of everyone. What he says, and the others' laughter - it keeps on echoing in your head and hurting. And you're helpless - the teachers who would ... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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Coloured comments in a word processor [Word/Libre/OpenOffice] - is it possible? Is there a way to have comments in different colours , in Microsoft Word, Open Office Writer, or Libre Office? (I am currently using Open Office, and I'm happy with it, but I am open to making the switch if need be.) If that would require installing some additional widget, but won't cause the file (... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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Consulting experts - why should they talk to someone who isn't a published writer yet? Whatever subject I am researching for my story, the common recommendation is "talk to the relevant professionals". If I need medical information, talk to a doctor. If I need information about the military, talk to soldiers. Talk to scholars, talk to museum curators, talk to designers, dancers, securi... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How would I extend a line in poetry? A line that refuses to be the right length is one of the struggles with writing poetry. Here's how I (try to) deal with it. Consider what it is you're saying, in that line, and in the lines around it. Can you use different words to express the same idea? Can you replace a word with a longer synonym?... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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How does one write from a minority culture? A question on cultural references Christian culture is dominant. Thus, even without being Christian myself, I can recognise, understand and appreciate references that are within that culture, like the Pietà: > Sam sat propped against the stone, his head dropping sideways and his breathing heavy. In his lap lay Frodo’s head, drowned ... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: What language shall they sing in? Here's an idea: for long periods of time, we spoke Hebrew alongside other languages: Aramaic, etc., and Hebrew was in fact spoken only be the educated elite. In particular, in the Haggadah, the passage "Ha lachma ania" (הא לחמא עניא) is in Aramaic so everyone would understand (because Aramaic was the... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: The English language, if England had a dictatorship There are multiple hints of dictatorial times within the English language. For example, have you noticed how farm animals have Anglo-Saxon names (calf, cow, lamb, pig), whereas meat derived from the same animals has French-derived names (veal, beef, mutton, pork)? That dates back to the Norman conque... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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What are the meta considerations when writing a play? What are the considerations one has to take into account when writing a play, that are imposed by the format of a play, a.k.a by the fact that it is played on stage? For example, in Shakespeare's time, all "corpses" had to be carried off stage, because there was no curtain and no lights that could b... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Crossing the line from Middle-Grade to Young-Adult Aged 10-12, my understanding of sex was "that's how you make children". It didn't sound like fun, so my understanding of why people would do it, other than to make children, was rather in the "adults are weird" realm. (Adults were also weird in other ways: they drank bitter coffee, and sour wine, and... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Writing dialogues for characters whose first language is not English Similar questions have been asked in the past, for example How do I make an ESL character sound realistic? and How to write dialogue for someone who is intelligent but barely speaks the language? You might take a look at those. Let me give you a different approach, however. Unless the way the chara... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: What are some ways of extending a description of a scenery? When describing the scenery, your goal isn't only to convey dry information (there are houses, there are trees, etc.). Your goal is to evoke some emotion, some feeling. Your key to extending the description of the scenery is therefore in what feeling you wish to evoke. For example, I look at a deser... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Is Jaime Lannister a "telling not showing" example? There is an element the other answers do not address. Jaime has a reputation as being a great swordsman. We are shown, not told, that he has this reputation. A character's reputation is as much an attribute of his, as any skill or trait he might possess. Now, a reputation can be true, or false, or s... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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Showing friendship between people of different ranks - maintain formality, or drop it? There is a prince. (Or some other person of high rank.) And there is that prince's good friend, who, naturally, holds a somewhat lower rank. There are two ways I could show the close relationship between the two: 1. They can maintain the rank distinction. Horatio addresses Hamlet "good my lord" and... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |