Posts by Galastel
Let me challenge your premise. You say you're writing alternative history. Usually, alternative history has one point of divergence from real history, and the effects of this divergence are explore...
One way of going "off the rails" not yet mentioned here is to actually embrace the predictable plot, and then go past it. With your setup, of course the hero is going to defeat the monster. Let tha...
At 16, the books our school recommended included 1984 and All Quiet on the Western Front. Crime and Punishment was part of the matriculation exam at 17. Also at 17, we were visiting Auschwitz. You ...
Since you're telling the story in first person, and the MC does something without understanding why, you could lampshade it. That is, after the fact, your MC could be commenting I don't know wh...
Should I touch on the aftermath of the battle, and the mass murder, rape, and enslavement of the army's 12,000 camp followers? Yes, you should. If this is something that happened in your world...
Since everyone is saying "no", let me say "yes". To some extent. Even as a young teenager, I never had trouble to put myself in the shoes of d'Artagnan, or Jean Valjean, or El Cid, or Lancelot, or...
Your description makes me think of Bioware games: the Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises. Both explore multiple themes throughout each game, involve multiple cultures - the things you mention. D...
A character I'm writing about is a girl of 15, daughter of a nobleman, unable to walk due to having contracted Polio when she was 5. Being quite intelligent, she attracts some useful attention, and...
You're in a tricky situation here: there's been so much written about women needing protection, that responding negatively to it is almost a knee-jerk reaction, whether justified or not. One way y...
So, you are concerned about representing a minority in your story, because you do not belong to that minority. Following the same logic, men shouldn't write about women, WASP Americans shouldn't wr...
@FraEnrico talks about epistolary novels, and I agree with him - it does sound very much like what you're trying to do. What troubles me, however, is that usually one would have epistolary novels. ...
I noticed a verbal tic in my writing: He looked surprised He looked confused He looked abashed Sometimes twice in a row: The prince looked abashed. “I- I thought I was being pol...
There are many ways you can tackle this question. Some considerations would be how close your narration is to the MC, how the MC thinks of themselves, and how you want the reader to think of her. L...
As others have explained, if a story is written in first person, the readers expect to be privy to the POV character's opinions, thoughts and feelings. This is true of third person limited too, and...
You do not make it clear whether your struggle is with the formatting of the lyrics (a question which @Cyn answers) or with structuring the scene, a question which I will attempt to tackle. The Lo...
One of the four forms of love Greek philosophy recognised, Philia is usually translated as "brotherly love". It is the love between true friends. It was considered a "higher form" of love than Eros...
Often books take a while to get into when they have a slow start, when not much is happening for the first part of the novel. However, you say that's not the case with you - you have plenty of acti...
I'm getting the impression that you're not looking for a story, so much as a world, a framework in which stories can take place. Consider, then: what is that world like? Our world (more or less)? O...
Describing something is significantly easier if you can look at it - you find words for what you're seeing, you form associations. Quite a few astronauts publish short videos from the ISS. Here's o...
Any source that you use in your work, be it academic literature, websites, or even tv programs, needs to be cited. Similar projects are extremely relevant to what you're doing, and therefore if you...
Intrigue (any kind, really, but royal courts were particularly known for it) is a series of setups that lead to a pay-off. For example, a handkerchief moved from one room to another, a word whisper...
It all depends on how you choose to tell your story. Are you telling it all in first person, as if the main character is recounting what happened to her? Then it would be strange if you suddenly ju...
Writing is where I run to, from everything that upsets me. I read the last scene I've been writing, from the beginning, and by the end - I'm in that moment, I've found my focus, I can proceed from ...
If what you're looking for is not stand-ins for real places, but just a generic place for your characters to be in, look at how real company names, real hotel names, real band names etc. are formed...
Surprisingly, dialogue tags are language-specific. In English, 'said' is considered transparent, the dialogue tag to be used most of the time, as opposed to "intoned", "articulated" etc., which are...
