Posts by Galastel
Publishers certainly don't always remove brands. Two example from Jim Butcher's Dresden Files: "I'm hungry," he said, his voice a low growl. "We can hit a McDonald's or something on the way h...
In real-life warfare, number of wounded normally exceeds significantly the number of fatalities. Which is good. There is, however, far more going on when a soldier is wounded than "get him into co...
I'm working on a war novel (sci-fi). My initial plan was for my MC to start out with a very clean language, almost comically clean, and as the plot progresses and the situation gets more FUBAR, his...
Historically, occidental cultures were not as biased against women as you might think. Look, for example, at this source on trial by combat between men and women. It suggests that at least some wom...
There are many examples of stories set in a post-apocalyptic space-faring human civilisation, with different takes on the idea. Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pe...
We are used to stories being about conflict. There can be an antagonist, or a hostile environment, or even an internal problem (like depression), but conflict is there. The story arc involves deali...
Generally, @MichaelKjörling and @HenryTaylor are right. Let me, however, look at the issue from a slightly different perspective. If you explain something, it has to make sense. If you don't expla...
Your teacher is quite wrong, I believe. "People who do science" don't help you with anything. Maybe one of them sits down and explains things to you, but another is this unfriendly power-hungry sch...
Jane Austen routinely did what it sounds like you want to do: she kept the big places intact (London, Bath), but the estates mentioned in her stories (e.g. Pemberly) are fictional, with only their ...
There are two ways religious concepts appear in speech. First, there are common expressions: "Oh my god", "go to hell", etc. Those are a natural part of our speech, we hear them all the times and ...
In writing a resurrection, you need to balance several conflicting ideas: on the one hand, the death of the character should be a possibility. Otherwise, this death is cheap, meaningless. "He died,...
Mixing sci-fi elements into a mostly fantasy story has been done before. For example, Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern starts out as a typical fantasy series, and then turns out to have also b...
Inspired by GGx's question Will traditional publishers force you to remove brands? I would probably not want to mention a brand name of a small brand in my work: a small brand might not want to be...
Evil-happenings-in-childhood and similar "extenuating circumstances" are a trope referred to as a Freudian Excuse (TV Tropes link). The main problem with this trope is what it implies: because char...
Assuming that by "non-readers" you mean "people who are not fans of the genre you write", they can be useful beta-readers. Here are some points for you to consider, in no particular order. Being ...
@Amadeus and @DPT both provide great answers. I will add one consideration to their answers, an aspect @DPT mentions, but doesn't elaborate on. It's not just how much description you have, how man...
Hmm. When I'm not sure about something, I like to look at some examples. All Quiet on the Western Front has the characters never win. In fact, they all die, and their side loses the war (something...
A while ago, I asked a similar question about representation of national groups. I invite you to take a look at it here. The answers I got boiled down to this: you cannot possibly have every human ...
In a way, all characters are disposable; you are their god, you are free to kill characters or keep them alive, as suits your Grand Plan. The question is rather what suits your grand plan - what ki...
I don't know what "Naruto-like hand symbols" are, but from the context of the question, I am going to assume they are some kind of complex hand gestures used to cast spells (or something similar). ...
The trope you're referring to, if I understand what you're saying, is "20 minutes into the future" (TV Tropes link here and onwards). Works based on this trope would usually focus on societal, rath...
As everybody else says, all options are viable. You can start from a scene that's bright in your mind and write to it and from it, you can throw scenes on paper and then connect them, you can start...
ESP stands for "Extrasensory Perception". It is an abbreviation. The correct way to write it is therefore in All Caps: ESP, similar to how one writes NASA, USA and DNA. A potential publisher would...
There are many possibilities of teams, in terms of number and group dynamics. You might want to look at TV Tropes: Power Trio, Four-Man Band and Five-Man Band for some fairly standard builds. Note,...
Let me start with a disclaimer: some languages are naturally more tolerant of long names (and long words) than others. In Finnish, you've got names like Väinämöinen. In Hebrew, if something has mor...
