Posts by Galastel
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...
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...
Whether the novel is set in Russia, or in the Middle Ages, or somewhere in Alpha Centauri, you are writing it in English. Whether your characters are "really" speaking Russian, Old English, or a to...
First and foremost, every character requires a backstory in your mind. You need to know who they are, why they act in a certain way, how they would respond to new situations, etc. Once you have th...
Building on Amadeus's answer, what you want to avoid is your character monologuing his backstory. Sometimes, a monologue can be done. If that story is gripping, and the scene is such that it makes...
One doesn't "decide" to be a plotter or a discovery-writer ("pantser" is not considered a polite term in writing circles). One is one or the other, or somewhere on the scale between the two. Some ...
The answer to your question depends on your proficiency with English: to what extent you're comfortable writing in English, to what extent you enjoy writing in English compared to Swedish. Do not d...
A character coming to understand that what they want is impossible and instead learning to live with what they have, is a perfectly reasonable character arc. The character overcomes something (wish...
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...
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...
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 i...
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...
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 ...
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 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 o...
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"...
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....
