Posts by Galastel
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 s...
The Spy is a Netflix series about Israeli spy and hero Eli Cohen. In a recent interview, Eli's widow Nadia expresses great dissatisfaction with the series: a lot of changes were made, ostensibly to...
When I don't know how to do something, I look for examples of how somebody else did it. Here's an example from Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series. The main character, a wizard, had a kinetic shield...
@Amadeus mentions constraints. Constraints are like the walls of a house - they are limits, but also supports of the structure. The constraints define the shape of the story you tell. If change is...
As others have pointed out, since you are in the main character's head, it's very hard to hide the fact that she feels no empathy. We are in her head, we know what she thinks and feels. That said,...
Here's an easy test: if for all intents and purposes the woman in your story could be replaced with a golden chalice, you're in trouble. Someone stole the guy's chalice, he wants to get it back. So...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 it...
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". W...
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 lif...
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 sho...
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...
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 nov...
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 ...
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 ...
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 symb...
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 ex...
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...
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 sce...
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 ...
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...
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"...
