Posts by Galastel
A character coming to understand that what they want is impossible and instead learning to live with what they have, is a perfectly reasonable character arc. The character overcomes something (wish...
My answer to your other question, here, should also answer this one. In brief, English is the language you're writing the novel in, so English is the language you're writing their dialogue in. Engl...
Whether the novel is set in Russia, or in the Middle Ages, or somewhere in Alpha Centauri, you are writing it in English. Whether your characters are "really" speaking Russian, Old English, or a to...
First and foremost, every character requires a backstory in your mind. You need to know who they are, why they act in a certain way, how they would respond to new situations, etc. Once you have th...
Building on Amadeus's answer, what you want to avoid is your character monologuing his backstory. Sometimes, a monologue can be done. If that story is gripping, and the scene is such that it makes...
Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Forest House is a lose retelling of Belini's opera Norma. Several hymns were taken from the opera verbatim, something done as tribute to the source material. Zimmer Brad...
You needn't reveal that the character has the ability, but you need to reveal the fact that the ability exists. Otherwise, indeed, this is a Deus ex Machina. How you reveal the existence of the ab...
Creating a branch is the easy part To create a branch, as you read the book take note of every choice the character makes. Map those out - what that choice leads to, what does that in turn lead to...
I am in the process of editing a short story. It is science fiction of the "if this goes on" kind: I take a social trend I see, and paint its event horizon - a troubling future. 1984 and Fahrenheit...
A short story has limited space, you have to limit yourself to a few characters and one conflict. A novel is not like that. In a novel you can have plots and subplots, a multitude of characters, yo...
Writing to friends and family, you can dispose with formality. You don't need a "structure". "Stream of consciousness" is how such letters were written before computers, before you could rearrange ...
One doesn't "decide" to be a plotter or a discovery-writer ("pantser" is not considered a polite term in writing circles). One is one or the other, or somewhere on the scale between the two. Some ...
The answer to your question depends on your proficiency with English: to what extent you're comfortable writing in English, to what extent you enjoy writing in English compared to Swedish. Do not d...
Think of the real world, the one in which we live. How do you grow a story out of it? The answer is there's plenty of stories, it's just a question of what interests you, what moves you, what kind...
I would like to offer a frame challenge: you're asking "will X make my story not fit the 'dark fantasy' sub-sub-genre". I say, write your story, make it a good one, then think what genre or sub-gen...
The short story Orange by Neil Gaiman, from his collection Trigger Warning takes your idea one step further: it's framed as a subject's responses to an investigator's written questionnaire. The que...
You're taking "show, don't tell" too strictly. There's no rules in writing - they're more what you'd call guidelines. If you're in doubt about a passage, write it both ways. Then see which one fee...
The answer to your question depends on how strongly the set of names is associated with the preexisting work of fiction. Not just the individual names, but the set of names together. For example, ...
I don't get only supporting the freedom of the kind of speech you like. If speech needs defending, it's probably because it's upsetting someone. (Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats, The ...
A crucial question: does the psychiatrist contribute anything to the story, or is he mainly the setting, the excuse as it where, for your protagonist to tell the story? If the psychiatrist makes n...
First of all, what do you mean by "taking inspiration from a movie"? If you mean copying the dialogue from a movie line for line, you're not allowed to do that. That's plagiarism. I would also que...
My beta readers are family and friends - people who read a lot, but do not write. They are people whose opinion I trust, and who are genuinely trying to be helpful. (And I haven't found a writing g...
Here's a critique I've received more than once: "your character talks like a character from a book. He's too eloquent, nobody really talks like that, unless they grew up in a library." Now, to som...
The thing that is often unnatural about giving exposition in dialogue is that both people having the dialogue should already be aware of what is being said. To solve that problem, you can either in...
@DPT's answer is great (+1), but let me add one more element to it: it's not enough that your characters interact with the setting. There needs to be a reason why your characters are there in the f...
