Posts by Galastel
It all depends on your perspective. Yes, some elements of the author's life, personality and way of seeing things make their way into their writing. No, a work of fiction is not a biography of its ...
If you're setting your story after an apocalypse, readers are likely to be curious what happened. If your setting is several centuries post-apocalypse, it's not unreasonable that nobody would know,...
As I've mentioned multiple times, I'm writing a military sci-fi novel. The focus of the story is war, and that happens far away from Earth. However, I'm starting with my MC's "normal", on Earth. It...
There is more than one way racism can be present in a work. For example, when Star Trek have on the bridge of the Enterprise an Asian pilot, a Russian navigator and a black Communications Officer,...
Something nobody has yet mentioned: you might want to write your story as a tribute to another work. For example, Neil Gaiman's A Study in Emerald is a tribute to Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes sto...
Let me start with an example: It's the waiting that was the worst. The attack would come, they just didn't know when. Could be another minute. Could be another hour. Ben sat nearby, sharpening ...
Are these many layers of misery inflicted upon innocents too much for a reader to handle? You must be careful here: the way you phrase that statement, you appear to be laying the blame on the ...
English is not my mother tongue. I am completely fluent in English though, and I write my fiction in English. Here's the problem: I live in neither the UK nor the US (nor any other English-speakin...
Short answer: J.K. Rowling claims never to have read a fantasy book in her life, and she did just fine. For that matter, J.R.R. Tolkien hadn't read much fantasy either. Long answer: who considers ...
As I've mentioned before, I'm working on a military sci-fi novel. Here's the trouble with the military: you don't spend all of your service, start to finish, with the same people. Not all the peop...
(Not a lawyer) In my country at least, the law is very clear: truth cannot be libel. However, for something to be considered "truth", you'd need undisputable proof, you'd need evidence, the truth ...
The way you make a character Scottish (or any other nationality) is you research that nationality. And you don't settle for the "Hollywood Atlas" version either (meaning a collection of exaggerated...
As both @F1Krazy and @Rasdashan say, it's not unrealistic for a character not to realise what is clear to the reader. In a way, the character actively refuses to connect the dots, she has a strong ...
There is a certain social image of what being a woman "means" - there are expectations both of how a woman would act, and how a woman would be treated. A particular female character is bound to eng...
The answer is research, research, and more research. I'm not an expert on horseback riding, or sword-fighting, or ruling a country. The only way I can write convincingly about those subjects is by ...
You're looking at this from the wrong side. Your goal isn't to include or to represent. Your goal is to tell a story. The story should contain all the elements that it requires, and nothing but the...
Since you feel there's no reason for your world to have the same days of the week as our world (that's reasonable), why must your world have weeks at all? Why must the weeks be of X days? A month i...
There is nothing wrong with having a person who is a member of a minority, and extremely annoying. 'Minority' can be sexual orientation, it can be disability, it can be religion or skin colour - wh...
When in doubt, do what the masters did. Some examples: Raoden breathed a sigh of relief. "Whoever you are, I'm glad to see you. I was beginning to think everyone in here was either dying or in...
General truths, such as "the earth is round" should be in present tense. Applying the past tense to such a statement would imply that the statement is not universally true, or might no longer be tr...
The game Dragon Age - Inquisition did this recently, quite successfully, with a side character, Krem. Krem is the second-in-command of a mercenary group one of your companions leads, so an NPC you ...
There are many factors that would affect whether 1000 words a day is realistic for you or not. E.g.: Do you do overtime? How long is your commute to/from work? Can you use the commute time for ...
There are two elements to your question. The first is the similarity to an existing work. That question is answered here: Is my story too similar to an existing published work? The second is the s...
A quote (called an epigraph) is added to the start of a book or a chapter when it adds an insight to the story. What kind of insight is up to you: it might be an additional understanding of events ...
You have a realistic effect that follows from the situation that you've put your character in, but that effect isn't interesting, nor does it affect the story in any significant way. The solution i...
