Posts by Galastel
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 point that has not been touched on in any of the other answers: for some of your readers, English is not their first language. Such readers, if they don't know English very well, would wonder if ...
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 ...
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...
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'...
A song has lyrics and music. Translating the lyrics, you'd want to keep the music. It means that as you're translating, you'd have to try to sing each line to the original music. The beats would ha...
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...
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...
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...
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...
End-of-line hyphenation is the process of breaking words between lines to create more consistency across a text block. (source) A long word is broken across a line-break by means of a hyphen. It he...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
