Posts by Galastel
The answer would greatly depend on who you're beta-reading for, and what they ask you for. One writer might have specific questions they'd want you to answer. Another would just ask for your impres...
Neil Gaiman, making a commencement speech in the University of the Arts in 2012, said the following: When you start out on a career in the arts you have no idea what you are doing. This is...
I need to speak at the unveiling of a memorial plaque (this one, incidentally). I have an idea of what I want to say, and how I want to arrange it. My struggle is with the opening. I have spoken ...
You do not. Nowhere in Green Eggs and Ham does Dr. Seuss tell you that the whole thing is written using exactly 50 different words. It's an "Easter Egg" as @Alexander points out in a comment. It's...
You have read books like this, or at least are familiar with books like this: Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls is set in Spain, and it is indicated, repeatedly, that the dialogue is in S...
You have been misinformed: The Lord of the Rings doesn't have short poems at the start of each chapter. The Lord of the Rings has poems of various length (up to several pages long), when characters...
Where I live, belonging to two-three ethnic groups is the norm. Children in school boast about being a quarter Iraqi, a quarter Moroccan, a quarter Polac and a quarter old Jerusalemi. How does one...
A few points, in no particular order: "A black man" paints a very different picture from "an elderly black gentleman" or "a tall, black-skinned young man". In the first case, the skin colour is t...
Lyrics are not lyrics until they are set to music. At which point, they are sung to the music. They appear on the sheet music. Like so: (source) Alternatively, the lyrics can be placed not over ...
This is something of a companion question to How does one write from a minority culture? A question on cultural references I have recently had a somewhat unpleasant experience reading Naomi Novik'...
Expanding on what I said in a comment to @Amadeus's post, I don't like thinking of "talking" with my character as an interview. A character might not want to answer a journalist, an interrogator, e...
In The Neverending Story, Michael Ende faces a somewhat similar challenge: the main character, Bastian, gets his hands on a book, and the narrative alternates between the book Bastian is reading, a...
You need to distinguish allegory and applicability. Tolkien wrote on the subject: I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and th...
Others have said Internal Dialogue, and I second that. But let me also offer an alternative. If the "demon" is a sufficiently separate entity that the character can talk to it, negotiate with it, a...
Let there be a character. Let the character's name be, for example, Alexander. Now, Alexander's parents call him 'Sasha'. His friends call him 'Xander'. His girlfriend calls him 'Alex'. In formal ...
What @linksassin says is a good approach, but it's not necessarily the only approach. Sometimes, one medium is the "main story", while the others are "supplementary material". This is the approach ...
Your MC has never met a living soul, per your statement. This would mean that she doesn't know who she's attracted to - not until she's met them, and experienced attraction. She meets a guy, she's...
There is an alternative that I see to the proposed answers. You can in fact use the proper names of items. Here's how. The first time the children encounter something they are unfamiliar with, the...
Often reading analyses of books and films, I find that the analytics derive conclusions from the specific food or beverage that a character consumes. The food appears to always be symbolic of somet...
I'm looking for free software, preferably open-source, that would allow me to create maps for my story. I guess what I need is a tool that would allow some measure of 3D modeling. Features I would...
If your website allows interaction - leaving comments etc., there is the hidden implication that someone on your behalf keeps an eye on those interaction, at least to the extent of keeping things c...
Do the particular details of the boxing match matter to the story? What details matter? Why do they matter? Surely not every single punch and block is of utmost importance? If I were describing a ...
I've noticed a quirk with the narrator voice of one of the two novels I'm working on. This narrator only describes the beautiful aspects of every character's features. You might think the women are...
First, always include a picture of the finished product. It helps me, as the customer, realise what it is they're trying to achieve, it helps me see whether my intermediary stage is in the right di...
A companion book - it's way too early to think of that. There's no sense in writing a companion book when you haven't written the main book yet. A companion to what would it be? Once you've publish...
