Activity for celtschk
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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A: Avoiding repetition when there are two unidentified individuals I think you can achieve a lot by just replacing the “was” sentence by making it an attribute in the following sentence, and making use of terms like “the first”, “the former” and “the other”. > The overwhelmingly tall figure stood in the corner of the room. The skinny figure right beside him sat on ... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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A: How to explain the main plot with science based concepts, without the non-sci-fi fans getting bored? Let me point out a different risk of providing a too detailed description of how the aliens learned about it: The risk of unnecessarily contradicting established science, and thus losing exactly those who would otherwise be most likely to enjoy detailed descriptions. In this particular case, it is c... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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A: Conflict and antagonist in a certain subtype of erotic novels I think it may be a good idea to first look generically to the possible types of conflict, to then look how well they fit to your definition of a purely erotic novel. I think the most important distinction in this respect is between obstacles and decision problems (note that I just made up that term... (more) |
— | almost 6 years ago |
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A: Avoiding spectacle creep While there are already many good answers, there's one option which I haven't seen mentioned (if I just missed it, sorry about that): Your hero may discover that the solution to the problem wasn't actually as good as thought. And now he has to fix it. For example, say the world had been held hostag... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How to write a convincing character with a opinion that differs from the author's? If the readers think the opinion of your protagonist is your own opinion, then I'd guess the problem is not that the protagonist has that opinion, but that the protagonist's opinion is not or not sufficiently challenged in the story. That is, the book actually seems to promote that protagonist's posi... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to make an email less "me" centric? Maybe it helps if you just change your viewpoint. You probably have written the mail with the viewpoint “I want this job.” Instead, consider the viewpoint ”The company will need to refill that job, and I'm a very good fit.” Think of an advertisement. You'll never find an advertisement that says “We ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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How much indirection is too much? I'm writing a chapter with a lot of indirection, and I'm wondering if I'm doing too much of it. To be specific, it is the main character remembering an event from his youth when a merchant who stayed over night in his home village told stories about what other people told him about their experiences... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Do writers write philosophical essays? I don't think philosophy and fiction are really opposites. The difference is that in fiction, you don't describe the philosophy, you show its consequences. For example, if your philosophy includes the claim that whatever bad you do, will come back to haunt you, then in a philosophical essay you'd ju... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What are the Pros and Cons of long names? A compromise might be that you have a long and complicated name, but also have a common short abbreviation of that, which normally is used. For example, using your name: > The city had the almost unpronounceable name Exopeildelivurathneyateyafilen, but usually people referred to it just as Exofilen.... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to differentiate narration and thoughts in the first person POV? I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but I'll interpret it as distinguishing between thoughts of the first-person narrator as character when the story happened, and the thoughts of the narrator when narrating it. This concept in my opinion only makes sense if the the narrator tells the story in the ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to make the reader think that the *character's* logic is flawed instead of the author's? Usually the narrator knows about the thoughts. And the narrator will know that the thoughts are illogical, and thus can distance himself/herself from the thoughts. Of course that only works if the narrator isn't the villain in first-person. For example, you might write something like: > Dick th... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to demonstrate an evolution of magic without it seeming like it is improvised? It probably depends on the protagonists. Are they themselves magic users? Or even magic researchers? Is there actually a separate magic research (like the science research system in our world), or is magic research something that is done in magic guilds or magic schools that guard their knowledge fro... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: If I'm writing in US English, am I not allowed to use the metric system? Just saw your edit: > However, I'm using it simply just to convey to the reader "the car was going super fast" in a fancier way. In that case, I'd say use neither mph nor km/h. When you see a car going fast, or sitting in a car going fast, you are not making a speed measurement/looking at the speed... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to make the murder's identity less obvious, or make the obviousness not matter? There are two lines of thought that come to my mind: First, this is a first person narrative, so the narration happens at some time after all that happened. Now, having done such a horrible thing, he might be in a state of self-denial. Also, he's a horror story author, so he's used to imagine horrib... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: What is the difference between Tension, Suspense and Mystery? Many good answers already, and I'm certainly not an expert on this, but yet I think I can still add something I haven't yet seen, or at least not recognized, in the other answers: Tension and suspense are emotional, while mystery is intellectual. I'd say tension is the basic reason why you read on.... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: How do I handle unintentional occurences of politically hot topics? One idea might be to think of his motivation and judgement. How does he know how to comfort her? Or that comforting her is the right thing in this situation? He must have some source of information of what would be the right thing to do. Normally I'd assume that comes from the social environment he ... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Tension built upon whether the main character will commit suicide or not. Problem: I'm using first person narrative I understand the question so that the story continues after the (postponed) death. Usually the reader knows how far into the story he is, so if there's too much story left, the reader will know, or at least expect, in advance that the first-person narrator will not die (unless it's a ghost story, as ... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Does the following opening grip you? The first few sentences left me puzzled: > Of all the people who wanted to join the trip, Paola was the the last I expected would come. It surprised me. We barely knew each other at school, and I was pretty sure she wasn't interested in me. So the only reason why someone would join a trip with seve... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Beginners can break rules too? I don't think this is in any way specific to writing. For example in physics, there are many wannabe-Einsteins who think that if you just claim the previous physicists were wrong and dream up your own theory, you can revolutionize physics. The result are crackpot theories, because unlike Einstein, th... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: My Hero is captured, now what? Another possibility that has not yet been mentioned is magic that works differently on humans and goblins. For example, the hero could have worn an amulet that offers some magic protection for humans, but has a very bad effect on any goblin wearing it. Of course the goblins would have stolen that amu... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Is there a complete guideline for which tense to use? Well, the way I understand the tenses is as follows ( warning: this is my personal understanding, which might not be entirely correct, especially since I'm not a native English speaker; if anything is wrong, corrections are welcome): There is a "baseline" tense, past, present or future, which tells ... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: Alien checking, by making questions One thing they could do is to ask questions about his home worlds with the intention to find inconsistencies that prove he's making things up. That would as a side effect also make the reader familiar with that home world. For example: > "So you are from a far-away planet? So where is this planet?"... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: How to "defy" physics on a sci-fi? A hint where you could actually place the new elements: You could put them in the island of stability. If some people expect half-lifes of millions of years, it's not much of a stretch to also put some stable element there (although a very long half-life may be good enough; after all, uranium is inst... (more) |
— | over 10 years ago |
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A: First Chapter for Free? If you publish the initial chapter, there's one thing you should make damn sure: That the readers are guaranteed to know up front that they are reading only a part of the story. Nothing puts you down more than if you expect to get the full story, and then detect that it's only a part, and you have to... (more) |
— | over 11 years ago |
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A: Basing fiction on personal life Considering that many of those threads from your life probably also involved other people, another pitfall is that someone else might recognize himself in your book and not like what you write about "him". If he's too recognizable, it might even get you in legal trouble. (more) |
— | over 11 years ago |
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A: Time measures in fantasy worlds One additional thought: Maybe the way you give time should depend on whether it is done by the narrator or by one of the protagonists. The narrator is telling the story to a present-day reader, so unless the narrator is supposed to be a person of that fantasy world, it would be natural if he tells... (more) |
— | over 11 years ago |
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A: Iambic pentameter: how do you use words with 'secondary stressed' syllables? I should warn that I'm actually not really qualified to answer this question since I neither know too much about a poetry nor am I even a native English speaker. However I'm answering anyway because I've made an observation which might adequately explain why the first version sounds fine and the seco... (more) |
— | over 11 years ago |
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A: How to format dialogue with an embedded long monologue One thing I would think about is: Are those things the other person says really unnecessary? They actually might give the reader valuable background information about what the other person already knows, and what that person considers normal (even though the reader may not) or extraordinatry (althoug... (more) |
— | over 11 years ago |
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A: What do you do if you enjoy writing, but have no ideas? Maybe you could write about the problem of coming up with ideas? Write a story about someone who has troubles coming up with ideas. Think about which solutions he might try, and how those solutions work or don't work. This has two effects: First, you already have one idea for a text, and it's someth... (more) |
— | over 11 years ago |
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A: What is the term for an accessible character that knows nothing? TVTropes calls such a character The Watson: > The Watson is the character whose job it is to ask the same questions the audience must be asking and let other characters explain what's going on. I don't know if it is desirable to have such a character (I'll let the more qualified people here answer ... (more) |
— | over 11 years ago |
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