Posts by Galastel
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 ...
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...
I agree with @Ash's answer regarding the fact that you can show a lot with body language. I would disagree with him however regarding what "winning" and "losing" would look like. Being excessively...
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...
The archetypes are a descriptive framework created by scholars in order to describe stories. Someone had a theory, says every story fits into one of those archetypes. Any story you give them, they ...
I am not aware of a "common practice" - writers are fickle beasts who tend to disregard rules. But there's nothing that says the progression of your story needs to be "linear unless marked otherwis...
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...
There are a lot of things you don't mention in your story. You don't mention how many times a day your MC uses the toilet. You don't mention how many beauty marks she has on her body. You probably ...
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...
Sometimes writers make mistakes. Sometimes they didn't know something. Sometimes they chose to ignore a fact because it got in the way of their story. This is so common, TV tropes has a whole famil...
It is not important, unnecessary, and in fact utterly impossible. You need to put yourself in the character's shoes, imagine how he feels, write that, try to evoke emotions in the reader. It helps ...
There are two questions hiding in your question, 1. Can the POV character not be the character who's most active? Consider Sherlock Holmes as an example. Watson is the POV character, the story is...
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 ...
I open Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises at random (chapter 9). 'I haven't seen you since I've been back,' Brett said. 'No.' 'How are you, Jake?' 'Fine.' Brett looked at me. 'I say,' she s...
There is a myriad of different ways your sergeant could be feeling and acting regarding his subordinate. He could value his former sweetheart's happiness, and thus be protective of her husband, f...
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...
Men do wear skirts: kilts, sarongs, hakamas, fustanellas... If your world is culturally diverse, any and all of those might have become common enough. In sci-fi stories in particular, new fashions ...
It is perfectly fine for your story to end with the "bad guy" winning. Consider for example George Orwell's 1984: He loved Big Brother Complete and utter defeat. 1984 is one of last century's...
One element of religious texts is the antiquated language. Since the text has been canonised, it has not changed while the language moved on. If you look at the Book of Esther as an example, it is...
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...
You need to go to Tools - Autocorrect - Autocorrect Options - Localised Options. There you can pick the kind of double quotes and single quotes you like. (Source. Note the source tries to do the ex...
