Posts by Galastel
The problem with a mood whiplash is: one of your characters just experienced something tragic, your readers are with the character in that tragic moment. If you want the readers to experience that ...
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...
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....
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...
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...
While a great many people speak English as a second language, and can thus enjoy reading a novel in English, the majority of people for whom English is the native language live in the US and the UK...
Between the brief ordered spreadsheets @Liquid suggests and the detailed but time-consuming wiki you suggest, there is a third way: keep notes of what you need in a semi-organised way that is conve...
Intelligence is manifested in how one thinks: how one views problems, and how one solves them. Eliezer Yudkowsky, author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, explains his approach to the...
The way a character talks reflects their social class, their level of education, where they come from, what kind of people they are and how the see the world. The last one in particular is key - if...
For symbols to work, they need to be understood. Think of symbols as a language; if you speak the language, and the readers speak the same language, everything's good. If, however, you speak the la...
Using semordnilaps is indeed common enough. TV tropes refers to this trope as "Sdrawkcab Name". You can follow the link for multiple examples across media. A particularly known example is 'Alucard'...
As far is legal rights are concerned, no, names generated by a generator are not copyrighted, nothing similar. Consider: a random string generator producing random letter combinations of random len...
We cannot tell you what to write or help you brainstorming - that's your task as a writer. However, we can try to assist you with how to brainstorm. It is very helpful, looking at a situation, to ...
One of the most touching scenes in The Lord of the Rings reads: And so Gollum found them hours later, when he returned, crawling and creeping down the path out of the gloom ahead. Sam sat propp...
Hard-to-pronounce names suggest a different culture. If War and Peace had its characters named not Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky and Pierre Kirillovich Bezukhov, but Andrew Bolk and Peter Bek; or i...
Readers will buy anything, if you can sell it. Vampires, wizards, talking animals, superpowers, sentient flat figures... Readers don't look for a realistic story. They look for a good story. Any pr...
From my limited experience with attempts at writing verse, your starting point is what it is you actually want to say. A poem is not a random jumble of words that rhyme - it is a picture or an idea...
