Activity for Galastel
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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A: Is time travel science fiction or fantasy? Time travel can enable the plot - appear as a plot device once at the start, and never show up again. Time travel is part of the setup, not part of the story , as it where. This is the case of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man. Those storie... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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Third wheel character I have three characters, who are supposed to be good friends. Athos, Aramis, and Porthos, if you wish. Instead, I have two characters who share a strong Frodo-Sam relationship, and the third guy, who is almost a "third wheel". It's not that my "Porthos" is less developed than the other two. But he i... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Materials to promote my book in person Thinking a bit further on the comment I've made, I think bookmarks are the most effective. Here's why: I'm offered a flyer, if I take it, I read, then throw away. Or, I find it interesting, stuff it into my bag, and forget it's there. Same with brochures, or any other object I have no immediate use ... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Is it possible to narrate a novel in a faux-historical style without alienating the reader? There are many elements of style, of the narrator voice, that have changed over time. @ChrisSunami talks about this, and brings the example of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel - one example I was going to bring. Let me give you some other examples, with the various effect they produce. The translation ... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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Finding out about other countries' military day-to-day Where does one go to find out about the day-to-day of military life? In countries other than my own? I don't mean combat - I mean the boring routine. Basic training. What kind of food is served in the mess. How soldiers address each other, how one speaks to a superior or a subordinate. Who cleans th... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How do I avoid the "chosen hero" feeling? To answer this question, I think it would be useful to look at The Lord of the Rings. We are explicitly told that Frodo is "chosen" for the task: > Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, book 1, cha... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Describing sex in a non-erotic fiction Let me start with an example, a famous one: > Then there was the smell of heather crushed and the roughness of the bent stalks under her head and the sun bright on her closed eyes and all his life he would remember the curve of her throat with her head pushed back into the heather roots and her lips... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Why write a book when there's a movie in my head? I agree with all the other answers so far, but let me take a different perspective on the whole thing. If you wish, read this answer as a frame challenge. You say "there's a movie in your head". What do you mean? Is it really a movie - does it fit into 2 hours, do you see each frame and how it's sho... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How to write painful torture scenes without being over-the-top You might find it helpful to look at the Torture Porn trope, to have a clearer idea of what to avoid. A work would be called "torture porn" when it appears to seek to disgust the reader/viewer while at the same time giving visceral thrills. Consequently, it would be full of "lovingly described" detai... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Is it plagiarism to use Google Translate? Translating your own work using GoogleTranslate is not plagiarism, any more than hiring someone to translate your work would be considered plagiarism. (In the latter case, you would insert a line stating "translated by...") While Google does store what you write, it's not a dump of "everything ever ... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How can I add more depth to my poem? In my own very brief experimentation with poetry, I always found it helpful to start with the image , the symbolism, as it were. So I wouldn't be "giving my poem more symbolism" - I'd start with the picture in my mind, and write the poem around that. In that fashion, I could replace words with synony... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Do I write the entire series and edit, or edit the books as I go? In theory, @LaurenIpsum's answer makes perfect sense. However, is we look at the market, we see this is not how things are done in practice. For example, J.K. Rowling planned from the start to write seven Harry Potter books, and certain plot points were planned from the start. For example, Voldemort... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: What are the things to consider when writing a sequel to a novel from another author? First thing you would need to decide is what you actually want to do with that sequel. Do you intend to write something that is basically "more of the same"? "More of the same", but more modern? Or do you want to deconstruct the source material in some way? All are viable options. In either case, th... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Writing a short story in the same universe as my novel Writing your short story as a standalone is highly useful. You want your story to be readable by as wide an audience as possible, so you don't want to depend on readers having already read your novel. In fact, a short story can serve as a sort of "advertisement" - if the readers like it, they would c... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How can I portray body horror and still be sensitive to people with disabilities? To the best of my understanding, the main problem with the zombie genre is that it positions decay-disease-disability as non-human evil to be eradicated, and as a threat to humankind. (I don't necessarily agree with that statement, but that appears to be what the guy in the video you link to is sayin... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: What are some ways to implement multiple endings in a novel? By offering multiple endings to your story, you are distancing the reader from the story, and breaking their immersion. In effect, you are saying, very loudly, as the narrator: "it could be that X happened, or Y, or Z, but I won't tell you which." So, you're moving the focus from the story to the nar... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How to tell readers your story is a re-imagination of a popular story? Romeo and Juliet is in the public domain. And it's not even the source material - Shakespeare borrowed the story from somewhere else, (Pyramus and Thysbe is one very similar story, and Ovid didn't invent it either) and retold it in the form of the famous play. That means you're free to rework the sou... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: To translate a novel with Westerner's point of view Translating another writer's book, you are limited: you have only the words that the author wrote. You get to move them around, because grammar has to match. You get to look for expressions in the target language that match expressions in the source material. You get to struggle with semantic gaps, a... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Does symbolism have only one level of depth? Here's the problem with what you are proposing: What you should be telling, what your readers want to read, is your actual story. Symbolism is a tool you use to tell that story: by using the symbol, you shed light on your story, you show and accentuate something that you couldn't have shown otherwis... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Time gaps in a novel Skipping hours, days, months, even years, is standard in fiction. In fact, it is narrating non-stop through the tedious everyday that's non-standard. How do you skip time then? Think of every scene as a mini-story. It should have some sort of opening, some "meat", and then it gets wrapped up (as @A... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How to make a grieving father less vengeful and see reason? It is a long way from wishing someone dead, to being able to actually do it. Even having set out to kill that company-owner, can your businessman really pull the trigger? Based on this, I would expect that on some level, your businessman would expect someone to stop him, even want someone to stop hi... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How do I write different factions with ideologies, philosophies, and symbolism? You want a group's symbolism and ideology to mesh together. That's not hard at all. Start with the group's core idea. What is it that they are, most of all? If you could sum up their "ideology" in one word or phrase, what would it be? (Examples could be: honour, wisdom, survival, paying your debts, ... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: I am afraid some scenes in my novel are too graphic for some people (Trigger warning: Sexual Assault) In Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane, chapter 7, the MC is seven years old, and his father attempts to drown him. > 'I'll apologise,' I told him. 'I'll say sorry. I didn't mean what I said. She's not a monster. She's...she's pretty.' > He didn't say anything in response. The bath was ... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Semicolon or better prose? Word's grammar checker is calibrated for documents, not for fiction. And even for documents, it is a bit of automated software, that is bound to make mistakes. You shouldn't trust it implicitly, and you shouldn't let it bully you. As @DoubleU states in a comment, your original sentence is perfectly ... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How to fill novel if you have just some moments prepared? You've got a plot planned out, you've got several scenes that you see vividly, you want to get them on paper, because they burn like a fire in your bones. Great. Now that you've done that, you must look at everything else. There are two ways you can approach this: you can plot what happens between y... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Writing a trilogy and editing Trilogies are rarely, if ever, published back-to-back. Instead, first one book is published, then, if it is successful, the second one, then the third. What this means is, when you query an agent, you have Book 1 finished to a T (as you would with a stand-alone book, when querying an agent). You als... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How to write characters who hate when you don't understand it? You say you've been lucky - nobody has given you a cause to hate them. Now imagine someone, or some group, laid deliberate, continuous, unjust abuse on someone(s) you cared about. Or imagine your own welfare and happiness being continually put under threat by a person's or group's deliberate actions.... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Latin names of European places As it turns out, Wikipedia has your answer: - List of Latin place names in Continental Europe, Ireland and Scandinavia - List of Roman place names in Britain Wikipedia also has the "external links" section for more details. (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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How to describe skin colour, if "white" is not the point of reference? A character looks at another character, skin colour creates certain associations. A character looks at himself, and associations would be shaped by society, and by what is "normal" in that society. What we refer to as "black", for example covers a huge range of brown shades, that would only be jumble... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Is bigotry always necessary in a story? Conflict makes the story interesting. If there's no conflict of some sort, if everything your characters want - they get handed on a silver platter, then you've got no story. Does the conflict(s) have to include bigotry? Not at all. Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series, an Urban Fantasy set in modern-... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Writing a fiction novel with poetic verses and handling dialogues Novels in verse, like Yevgeniy Onegin subject everything else to the structure of the verse. This means that instead of following the usual format of starting a new line for each character's line of dialogue, a new line or a new paragraph would be started according to the demands of the prosody. It m... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Characters speaking different languages There are two easy ways to handle this, depending on whether you want the readers to understand what is being said, or not. In truth, whether you want the readers to understand or not is the only important factor. Which characters understand is irrelevant to how you write the dialogue. 1. If the rea... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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Dead children in pre-modern setting The reality of pre-Industrial Revolution times was that about half the children born died before age 5. It would be a mistake to think that parents cared less - we have multiple written records showing that they cared very much. At the same time, there was this coping mechanism - parents tried not to... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How to get my characters' emotions out of the way so I can get on with the plot? Your setup reminds me of multiple stories I've read as a kid of a group of characters getting stuck on a desert island. In particular, I'm fairly sure Jules Verne had one with kids, I recall another one with kids set in the 1930s or 1940s. (Not Lord of the Flies. That one put an end to the genre.) N... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How do you prevent whiplash when transitioning between comedy and tragedy? The problem with a mood whiplash is: one of your characters just experienced something tragic, your readers are with the character in that tragic moment. If you want the readers to experience that tragedy, you've got to give them time to process, to experience. When you jump to a comic scene instead,... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Is there a way to know if a metaphor is bad or not? First and foremost, a metaphor needs to be understood. When Shakespeare says "All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances", you are not left wondering a metaphor for what the stage is - Shakespeare tells you. Your metaphors are all loc... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Re-reading and making changes to current work that makes everything worse? I too start by rereading a part of what I wrote, in order to "get into the mood". And sometimes, instead of getting into the writing mood, I get into the "this doesn't work at all, it needs to be changed" mood. Here's what works for me: instead of editing, I mark the part that needs editing, and lea... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Storing WorldBuilding Information Between the brief ordered spreadsheets @Liquid suggests and the detailed but time-consuming wiki you suggest, there is a third way: keep notes of what you need in a semi-organised way that is convenient. Let me explain. - You have characters. It might be that you need to keep only certain details a... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Writing the dialogues of characters who are much smarter than you Intelligence is manifested in how one thinks: how one views problems, and how one solves them. Eliezer Yudkowsky, author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, explains his approach to the problem of very intelligent characters in this blogpost. As a brief example, an intelligent character... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Ensuring that character dialogues sound like they are coming from different people The way a character talks reflects their social class, their level of education, where they come from, what kind of people they are and how the see the world. The last one in particular is key - if all your characters appear to see the world in exactly the same way, it wouldn't matter that they happe... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Creating a fairytale for adults Stories for adults, based on, or including elements of fairy tales, are quite common. For example, Neil Gaiman's Snow, Glass, Apples is a retelling of Snow White, with an evil vampire Snow White and a necrophiliac prince. "Not for children" doesn't begin to cover how dark and creepy that story is. I... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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How much description is too much? A companion question for How much description is necessary, how much description is too much? I close my eyes, I can visualise my MC's bedroom (for example) in tiniest detail: the accent wallpaper, the collection of spaceship models, the view out of his window... Of course, a clutter of irrelevant ... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Using symbols to refer to mythological figures For symbols to work, they need to be understood. Think of symbols as a language; if you speak the language, and the readers speak the same language, everything's good. If, however, you speak the language, but the readers don't, your message would get lost, just as if you'd chosen to write half your p... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How is a semordnilap typically used? Using semordnilaps is indeed common enough. TV tropes refers to this trope as "Sdrawkcab Name". You can follow the link for multiple examples across media. A particularly known example is 'Alucard', a semordnilap so commonly used that TV Tropes gave it its own page. However, because the tool is so c... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Is using an online name generator a good idea? As far is legal rights are concerned, no, names generated by a generator are not copyrighted, nothing similar. Consider: a random string generator producing random letter combinations of random lengths could theoretically produce every word in the dictionary. One cannot copyright those, right? A nam... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Continuing a short story We cannot tell you what to write or help you brainstorming - that's your task as a writer. However, we can try to assist you with how to brainstorm. It is very helpful, looking at a situation, to ask questions. How does your character feel in the situation? What is she thinking about? Why is she the... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: How do you describe sentimental human physical interactions? One of the most touching scenes in The Lord of the Rings reads: > And so Gollum found them hours later, when he returned, crawling and creeping down the path out of the gloom ahead. Sam sat propped against the stone, his head dropping sideways and his breathing heavy. In his lap lay Frodo’s head, dr... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Do hard to pronounce names break immersion? Hard-to-pronounce names suggest a different culture. If War and Peace had its characters named not Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky and Pierre Kirillovich Bezukhov, but Andrew Bolk and Peter Bek; or if the characters of the Kalevala were named not Väinämöinen and Joukahainen, but Van and John, that woul... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Fictional cultures and languages existing in the same area? Readers will buy anything, if you can sell it. Vampires, wizards, talking animals, superpowers, sentient flat figures... Readers don't look for a realistic story. They look for a good story. Any premise will be accepted, if that's what is needed to tell your story, and if your story is good. Take H... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |
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A: Is it time to start closing up my novel? Remember your goal: you have set out to tell a story. So tell the story. Forget the wordcount. You feel the story needs more meat, give it more meat. You feel you need to explore more themes, go ahead and explore them. (If you don't know what to write, that's a separate problem - a separate question.... (more) |
— | about 5 years ago |