Activity for Galastel
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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A: A question on determining audience I believe you are being too specific when you're looking at who your audience is. Suggesting your passage would be solely interesting to collectors of objects would be like suggesting that Jules Verne's extensive explanation of marine biology in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea would only be interesting ... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Could I have some characters reveal more internal monologue than others? By their very nature as being main characters, your main characters would receive more attention than side characters. That's what makes them 'main'. It's their arc that we follow, it's their motivations that we know, it's them we care about and sympathise with. Take The Lord of the Rings as a famou... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: What are some of the tricks used to end a verse with a specific word? From my limited experience with attempts at writing verse, your starting point is what it is you actually want to say. A poem is not a random jumble of words that rhyme - it is a picture or an idea displayed by means of those words. So that's your first guiding technique - what is it that you're tryi... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: How important is the apocalypse in a post-apocalyptic story? If you're setting your story after an apocalypse, readers are likely to be curious what happened. If your setting is several centuries post-apocalypse, it's not unreasonable that nobody would know, and it is less relevant to the ongoing story anyway. If, however your setting is only several decades a... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Why is it that all the bestselling indie authors are based in the US (and, to a much smaller degree, the UK)? While a great many people speak English as a second language, and can thus enjoy reading a novel in English, the majority of people for whom English is the native language live in the US and the UK. (There's also Australia, Canada, South Africa and several others. However, Canada's population, for ex... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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In the background of the Future As I've mentioned multiple times, I'm writing a military sci-fi novel. The focus of the story is war, and that happens far away from Earth. However, I'm starting with my MC's "normal", on Earth. It is this "normal" that I'd like to ask about. I've set the story in the future because for it to be pos... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Should I add racism in my book's world or have my world have no racism? There is more than one way racism can be present in a work. For example, when Star Trek have on the bridge of the Enterprise an Asian pilot, a Russian navigator and a black Communications Officer, and they all get along swimmingly, all at the time of the Cold War, the Yellow Peril and the Civil Righ... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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How to write a memorial plaque? I've been tasked with drafting the text for a memorial plaque dedicated to group X. Group X was big, diverse, and had several hundred years of rich history. Amount of space I have is 2-3 sentences. I don't want the memorial to be yet another "a whole bunch of people died in the Holocaust". I'm looki... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: How to show the same emotion multiple times? Let me start with an example: > It's the waiting that was the worst. The attack would come, they just didn't know when. Could be another minute. Could be another hour. Ben sat nearby, sharpening his bayonet. Aaron wanted to scream at him to stop making that godawful noise, like a nail scratching gla... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: What are the advantages and disadvantages of setting a story in a made up country, compared to a real one? Every revolution is different. Every civil war is different. They are different in why they are fought, they are different in how they are fought, they are different in who is fighting. (To clarify, I do not mean the obvious "who" as in "the English" or "the French". "Who" can mean different classes,... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: The relationship between the MC's Goal and the climax I believe you are misunderstanding what a climax is. To quote Wikipedia, > The climax (from the Greek word κλῖμαξ, meaning "staircase" and "ladder") or turning point of a narrative work is its point of highest tension and drama, or it is the time when the action starts during which the solution is g... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Story that's too depressing? > Are these many layers of misery inflicted upon innocents too much for a reader to handle? You must be careful here: the way you phrase that statement, you appear to be laying the blame on the reader - "the story is good, but the reader is too weak for it". Consider instead the alternative approach... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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British / American language mishmash English is not my mother tongue. I am completely fluent in English though, and I write my fiction in English. Here's the problem: I live in neither the UK nor the US (nor any other English-speaking country), so I am exposed to both in equal measure (through literature, film, etc.) I spell the Britis... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Is it bad if I don't like the "best" books in my chosen genre? Short answer: J.K. Rowling claims never to have read a fantasy book in her life, and she did just fine. For that matter, J.R.R. Tolkien hadn't read much fantasy either. Long answer: who considers the books on your list "best" in their genre? I haven't heard anything other than ridicule for Wheel of... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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First quarter friends As I've mentioned before, I'm working on a military sci-fi novel. Here's the trouble with the military: you don't spend all of your service, start to finish, with the same people. Not all the people you've done Basic Training with will proceed to the same Advanced Training as you. Not everyone who c... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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Little disjointed scenes My MC is going through boot camp. Physically and mentally, he goes from high-school boy to soldier prepared for combat. Along the way there's struggles, there's new friendships formed, there's the changing interaction with his family (we're talking Israeli boot camp - he's home every third weekend). ... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: How to present an alien culture with different morals, without it coming across as savage? @Amadeus mentions duels. A crucial fact to the understanding of duelling, mostly ignored in the modern media: it was the seconds' task to attempt reconciliation. So, in fact, asking someone to a duel was a form of ritualised threat, its intent generally to ideally not have to back it up with actual a... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Pop star names and other famous people or characters (Not a lawyer) In my country at least, the law is very clear: truth cannot be libel. However, for something to be considered "truth", you'd need undisputable proof, you'd need evidence, the truth would need to be attestable. Now what would you intend to prove, and how would you prove it? If the per... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: How can I make my character sound Scottish? The way you make a character Scottish (or any other nationality) is you research that nationality. And you don't settle for the "Hollywood Atlas" version either (meaning a collection of exaggerated stereotypes. And that's a tv tropes link). You find out about real Scotland, and ground your character ... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: MC doesn't know something that's obvious to the reader As both @F1Krazy and @Rasdashan say, it's not unrealistic for a character not to realise what is clear to the reader. In a way, the character actively refuses to connect the dots, she has a strong impetus to respond this way, whereas the readers would have no inhibition to understanding what's going ... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Do authors often base their characters off of themselves? It all depends on your perspective. Yes, some elements of the author's life, personality and way of seeing things make their way into their writing. No, a work of fiction is not a biography of its author. In particular, authors tend to have written more than one book. They cannot all be the author's ... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Could the cast of my book be more unique? You're looking at "uniqueness" the wrong way, I think. Look, for example, at The Lord of the Rings: Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin are all hobbits. They come from the same place, they share the same kind of views, they're all heterosexual white men, three of them are the same social class. This doesn't... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Character is an expert on something I'm not The answer is research, research, and more research. I'm not an expert on horseback riding, or sword-fighting, or ruling a country. The only way I can write convincingly about those subjects is by doing research. Research can take many forms. It can be reading about the subject, both guides and firs... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Is no religion a bad thing? You're looking at this from the wrong side. Your goal isn't to include or to represent. Your goal is to tell a story. The story should contain all the elements that it requires, and nothing but the elements it requires. "Including" anything that isn't useful to the story in any way is called 'shoehor... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Should I make up my own names for the days of the week/months Since you feel there's no reason for your world to have the same days of the week as our world (that's reasonable), why must your world have weeks at all? Why must the weeks be of X days? A month is a length of time that's tied to a natural phenomenon - the turn of the moon around the earth. The week... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Convincing argument about something I don't agree with The world isn't all black and white - it's grey and gray. There are arguments to be made for dictatorship. Consider, at the very least, the famous joke "a camel is a horse designed by a committee." It emphasises the ineffectiveness of group decision-making. What is democracy, if not a country run by ... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: How best to avoid the appearance of stereotype? There is nothing wrong with having a person who is a member of a minority, and extremely annoying. 'Minority' can be sexual orientation, it can be disability, it can be religion or skin colour - whatever. However, if the annoying character is extremely annoying and the only representative of their m... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: The use of footnotes to translate foreign words in a novel When in doubt, do what the masters did. Some examples: > Raoden breathed a sigh of relief. "Whoever you are, I'm glad to see you. I was beginning to think everyone in here was either dying or insane." > "We can't be dying," the an responded with a snort. "We're already dead. Kolo?" > "Kolo." Th... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Is my story "too diverse"? > Is it alienating to readers who are white and straight to be put into the shoes of someone who is drastically dissimilar to them? Is it alienating for a modern American to read a story about medieval France? Or about short hairy-footed Brits who live in fantasy-land? Those differences you mention... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Should I change from past to present tense to state a fact that continues into the present and is unyielding? General truths, such as "the earth is round" should be in present tense. Applying the past tense to such a statement would imply that the statement is not universally true, or might no longer be true. Compare: > Winter is cold. A general statement about the nature of winter, to: > That winter wa... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Realistically incorporating trans/nonbinary characters The game Dragon Age - Inquisition did this recently, quite successfully, with a side character, Krem. Krem is the second-in-command of a mercenary group one of your companions leads, so an NPC you interact with about a dozen times throughout the game. He tells you he's trans about halfway into the ga... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: 1000 words a day for a part-time writer There are many factors that would affect whether 1000 words a day is realistic for you or not. E.g.: - Do you do overtime? - How long is your commute to/from work? - Can you use the commute time for writing? - What else do you have to do other than working? Do you have a spouse? Children? Must you... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Is my book legal? Is my story too similiar to Harry Potter There are two elements to your question. The first is the similarity to an existing work. That question is answered here: Is my story too similar to an existing published work? The second is the shared universe. Now that is a problem. Some authors have explicitly allowed their universe to be used by... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Quote at the beginning of a chapter, is it advisable for fiction novels? A quote (called an epigraph) is added to the start of a book or a chapter when it adds an insight to the story. What kind of insight is up to you: it might be an additional understanding of events on a meta level, it can be foreshadowing, it can be extra information, etc. It is never a random quote f... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Should we add a character in a story for realistic effect? You have a realistic effect that follows from the situation that you've put your character in, but that effect isn't interesting, nor does it affect the story in any significant way. The solution is have it happen off screen. You have the MC eat, realistically they'd have to use the toilet. But you ... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Not projecting myself onto my characters Surely there's more to you than "mental illness guy"? Consider what other parts of yourself you could project onto a character. A hobby of yours can be your character's main occupation. A childhood dream you gave up on could be your character's reality. An abstract fear of yours can be something your... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: A critic made a comment that my female character sounds like she was written by a man There is a certain social image of what being a woman "means" - there are expectations both of how a woman would act, and how a woman would be treated. A particular female character is bound to engage with that image, whether she accepts it, rejects it, does something else with it. You, as a writer, ... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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The problem of the throwaway boyfriend In the first 10% of my novel, my MC has a boyfriend. MC is accepted into the Space Corps (or he's summoned to fight Troy - the particulars don't really matter), boyfriend is sure he'll wait the required X years. MC starts training, and already the forced separation, the change in their respective li... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: What keeps most authors writing after receiving multiple rejections? What keeps writers writing is the utter impossibility of not writing. Tolkien had no hope of ever publishing The Silmarillion, yet he kept writing and rewriting and editing and re-editing it throughout his life. Keats was receiving negative reviews, yet he didn't quit writing and turn to medicine, th... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: How can you humanize infanticide of the evil-tainted? I think, to humanise infanticide, you can present the whole thing as the terrible tragedy it is: the parents would have done anything to prevent this situation, they would accept any sacrifices to avoid this now, but there's simply no choice. They are shattered by what they must do. They are deeply t... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Repetitive sentences If I understand the problem correctly, I think what you want to be doing is vary the subject of your sentences. Look at this example: > John walked out of the office. He observed the sky turning grey, and then felt cold rain landing on him. He opened his umbrella. Now this: > John walked out of h... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: How do you make characters relatable if they exist in a completely different moral context? There is no problem at all with writing morally ambiguous characters, and it's surprisingly easy for readers to sympathise with them. Let us look at some examples: First, a modern example: A Song of Ice and Fire by G.R.R. Martin. There was a character in the first book of the series, who had all tho... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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Using real words from a foreign culture feels like 'Calling a rabbit a "smeerp"' I'm working on a novel, that's set in pre-Islamic Persia, in the same general way that The Lord of the Rings is set in Britain. (Meaning, it's set in a world all its own, but there's this source of inspiration.) Here's my conundrum: the land is ruled by the Shah - that's a given, that's expected if ... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Running four parallel stories Theoretically, yes, you can have four parallel stories. The relevant trope is called Four Lines, All Waiting. The most famous example of such storytelling that comes to mind is G.R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire. However, the downside of this approach is, as implied by the name, that at any given t... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Naming my characters It's a good idea to decide early on on a naming scheme. That is, do you want names that sound like they belong to a particular time and place? Particular times and places (plural) for various groups within your story? Do you want names that are almost real, but not quite? (For example Eddart, from G.... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Is this attribution clear and sufficient? The old-fashioned language alone is enough to provide a hint that the characters are quoting something, and since you mention Paradise Lost, it's clear what they're quoting. Strictly speaking, you can provide much less by way of attribution. For example: > If you want to imagine the future, imagine... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: On Characters' Motivations What you're describing is a trope known as Broken Pedestal (tv tropes link). It describes the painful disillusionment with someone the MC considered a role-model, or otherwise a person to be respected and admired, until discovering that character's "true colours". Such disillusionment can be a power... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: How to structure a book with small unrelated sections like a book of short stories or historical events? What is the unifying factor of your book? Is it an anthology of disconnected short stories? Is it an exploration of some theme? If you are exploring a theme, Structure the parts to make a cohesive argument, of sorts. For example, if you are exploring the theme of love throughout history, it would m... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: Will it push away a reader if I start my book with the frame story? You must decide first and foremost how you want your readers to initially treat your MC's belief that he is influenced by an "entity". If you tell the readers right from the start that the entity in question exists, they are going to view everything differently from if you allow them to assume at fir... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |
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A: How to balance male protagonist sensitivity to women Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series addresses this issue in an interesting way. The main character, male, single, and in his late twenties in the start of the series, very much notices the looks of the women around him. That is, the stories are narrated in first person, and whenever a new female chara... (more) |
— | over 5 years ago |