Posts by Galastel
I start writing a short story, I'm loving it. If I didn't love it, if I didn't want to tell it, I wouldn't be writing it. I finish the first draft, I still love it, and am so proud of completing i...
You do not mention whether you're telling your story in first person or third, and if in third person - limited or omniscient. In third, your task is easier, since you have the narrator to mention ...
Having googled Kurt Vonnegut's writing tips, I found several different explanations of tip #5. Since all explanations have some merit (as far as being useful advice), and since I don't know which o...
You're saying you've written yourself into a corner. You appear to have to options, and you don't like either. You're forgetting: you are the writer. You are god. Your story is not set in stone, yo...
At the moment, it appears we're receiving rep for Meta questions and answers, same as for regular questions and answers. Is that how we want it? I can see arguments both ways: Participation in M...
@CrisSunami is spot-on: don't introduce all your characters at once. Don't start with a scene where they are all present - start with a few characters, then bring in more. Having a great many unfam...
The military, the medical professions, police, etc. - they have their professional jargon. One noteworthy characteristic of this jargon is the extensive use of abbreviations. Those abbreviations ar...
There are pitfalls into which you are more likely to fall if you base your protagonists on yourself and/or people you care about. These pitfalls can trouble you regardless, but if you're basing a c...
The examples you bring are of food taste described badly, as @MarkBaker explains in great detail. Those descriptions fail to evoke what they're supposed to evoke, and instead take your mind to all ...
The "stupid action" of your character needs to line up with the traits that character usually shows. It cannot be a random action taken out of the blue - that would, as @Amadeus points out, break t...
You are right in thinking both that details are needed - they make the scene come alive, and that the details shouldn't be random. I use the scenery details first and foremost to set the mood of a...
When in The Lord of the Rings Tolkien writes ‘But it is a heavy burden. So heavy that none could lay it on another. I do not lay it on you. But if you take it freely, I will say that your choic...
One element of curating is which answer got accepted. It relates to what Amadeus says about first answer getting all the votes: the OP presumably sees all answers, and picks the one that helped mos...
Just checked: the tags for regular questions and for Meta are all available everywhere. I can ask a question tagged "feature-request" on the main page, for instance. Is it possible to have them sep...
Let's take a look at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields in the Lord of the Rings: First, we have the Rohirrim. Among them are Theoden, Éowyn, Éomer and Merry. Then we have Minas Tirith, with its va...
In English, the dialogue tags you want to be using most of the time are "said" and "asked". "Answered"/"replied" is also OK. Those dialogue tags are transparent, as it where - our mind slides off t...
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...
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 aga...
As @sesquipedalias says, for a discovery writer the first draft can often be about figuring out what your novel is, what you're trying to say. You say you have story threads that you don't know wh...
We tend to assume whatever we're reading about is humanoid, unless we're told otherwise. (In fact, multiple stories exploit this trope to reveal later in the story, or in the very end, that the cha...
If I understand your question correctly, you're asking to which extent the Rule of Cool trope would let you get away with things in a relatively realistic story. The answer to that is, distinct st...
The trait that makes Dolores Umbridge, and other characters, repulsive, is sadism. Enjoying the suffering of others, enjoying causing pain - we find that unforgivable. A villain who hurts others du...
I just ran a search on all of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files for the '?!' mark. Why this series in particular? It's modern Stylistically, I expected to find '?!' there. I had it on my computer, so I...
If you wish to depict encrypted text, use an actual encryption. Something that could be decrypted by hand, but would require some effort. That would be a fun for a puzzle-minded reader to figure ou...
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...
