Posts by Galastel
Here's another perspective for you: I am working on a novel with many characters. In quite a few of them, there is a bit of me: I give them my values, and then make them argue which core value tak...
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 ...
Each usage has its place. #1 is most commonly used in such situations. Even if you're not writing for children, you don't necessarily want every bit of cursing. Sometimes telling that the characte...
More than one author has struggled with the same problem before. There is a Russian children's story about a dog named 'Shoo' - the dog has been shooed so many times, that by the time it was adopte...
A while ago, I started writing a short story for a competition. It was supposed to be about four girls in a shared student apartment. The plan was to have everyone conflict with everyone until they...
I don't think readers are as conservative regarding genre as you make them out to be. Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber is one very well known example of fantasy, with no elves, no dragons, and a...
Some events are far-off historical events. The most you risk if you write about them without doing the proper research is making a fool of yourself. Other events are still within living memory. So...
My tendency when writing is to give every character a name. Even the most minor ones. It says something about a nobleman when he knows every guard and stablehand by name, and it's something I want....
A "dictionary" for your fantasy language should never be needed by the reader. If the reader has to learn a language, or flip back and forth to a dictionary, the flow of the reading is broken every...
Let me expand on @Cyn's answer. Tolkien wrote for himself. He was sure there would never be an audience for the Silamrillion, and was surprised by the wide acclaim of The Lord of the Rings. So wer...
I am holding a book (novel) which I wish to cite, and I believe it has a typo. I do not know whether the typo was a spelling mistake in the original manuscript, or introduced during print. Other ed...
Surely you can imagine your protagonist possessing more than one character trait? He can be intelligent and kind and charmingly clumsy? Why then can't one girl be attracted to his wit, another - to...
What is "the right way"? Why do you consider it better than some other way to write a story? What do you consider "mistakes"? You can ask your son about why he has made certain stylistic choices o...
I'd say parents might not buy an 8-year-old a book for reading it out loud at all. Regardless of length. An 8-year-old can read, and read well. He has no need for someone to read a book out loud to...
Writing an answer to another question, I stumbled upon a quote from The Hobbit: Bilbo rushed along the passage, very angry, and altogether bewildered and bewuthered - this was the most awkward ...
If you feel it is clear enough who is speaking, you can skip the attribution. For example, if two people are speaking, the reader would assume that they're taking turns, so you don't need to attrib...
The easiest solution is to split up the introduction. If it's possible at all, have the MC share a scene with one or two characters, then with two or three others, and so on until you've introduced...
An omniscient narrator can tell the whole story: sometimes the narrator's focus is on the MC, sometimes it's elsewhere. However, if the narrator only rarely strays away from sitting on the MC's sh...
It would be helpful if you could provide a sample of your writing. It is a bit hard to judge whether you're using too many exclamation marks, if we can't see how many you're using. :) As a general...
It's a fine balance you're trying to strike, between "unrealistically resistant to pain", and "we get it, get on with the story". I'd say, try to use the reminders that "character is in pain" to p...
Pretending to "have found and edited an obscure manuscript" is quite a common literary device. A few other examples include Neil Gaiman's The Dream Hunters (Illustrated by Yoshitako Amano, part of ...
I'd say the question of Active vs. Reactive hero is as much a question of how you present events, as of what is actually happening. Let me give you an example: Frodo, the main character of the wil...
Let's start with description: how to describe a living creature, without referencing other living creatures. What does it have - scales, tail, wings? How many limbs? On how many does it walk, if at...
What positive character traits does your MC have? Surely he isn't all bad, a one-dimensional caricature of schmuckiness? Consider: in The Three Musketeers, d'Artagnan beats his servant (and Athos ...
My impression is that you've got so much going on in so few words, that you never really allow the reader to settle down and experience a scene, understand what's going on, go through your characte...
