Posts by Liquid
Your first example is not a straight-forward, out of the book example of breaking a POV. Your character may as well suspect that other people have a bad opinion on him. He might have overheard some...
I'd use the phonetic spelling, unless you're planning to publish in a country where both Arabic and English are commonplace. The reason is that it's easier for someone used to the latin alphabeth...
This question popped into my mind after criticizing the strategic choices in a recent episode of a famous fantasy television show (coffs). A lot of genre fiction (mostly fantasy, even if we may ca...
According to Wikipedia, An epilogue is the final chapter at the end of a story that often serves to reveal the fates of the characters. Some epilogues may feature scenes only tangentially rela...
Let's suppose you have finished your novel, through all the appropriate stages of drafting and editing needed. You begin submitting the book to various agents and/or publishing companies, but none ...
I'm writing a novel focusing on a single character POV. For many aspects, it can be considered a coming of age story; along with the usual tropes of the hero's journey, my protagonist gradually lea...
Science fiction has been defined as a genre where the "incredible" elements are "recognizable as not-true, but also as not-unlike-true, not-flatly- (and in the current state of knowledge) impossibl...
However, if I just pick a random arbitrary theme by spinning the great wheel of themes, then I find myself struggling to develop it because there is nothing behind it. Then I fizzle out and ...
I'll add to the already good answers: effective ways to describe fear, doubt, exhaustion, love... There are a lot of writing guides out there, some more general, some more specific. Some bad,...
In the modern world, english is a well-estabilished technical and scientific language. Some terms have become so commonly used that they are accepted in my native tongue (words like "computer", "PC...
I think that in this case you may want to keep both ways open. Diagrams are usually allright in academic and technical contexts, but you mentioned this is a college assessment and your ability to...
Most authors use dialogue in writing, especially when writing fiction. Now, if I remember my first grade primary school correctly, dialogue can be directly separated from narration in a number of w...
I never used the snowflake method myself, even if I gave it a look sometime ago. The problem with your abstract and concrete goals is that one is the specialization of the other. After all "kill...
In novels, when the PoV follows a particular character, is pretty common that we get to hear his/her thoughts. Sometimes, those thoughts take the form of questions that the character ask himself: ...
As far as I remember about story structure and McKee, and as far as a quick search on google yielded, No. Acts are larger than chapters, in most books of medium lenght. Acts are actually a conce...
I feel as though I'm out of options for exploring these characters in a more intimate fashion. It's not feasible to me that any of them would keep a diary or write letters. I don't want to write...
Sarcasm is tricky. You correctly state that the written word is a poor medium for sarcasm (and surely you can't put your retorts betwen tags, unless if you hope to become a meme on some obscure in...
You have a lot to talk about, in theory. A city under siege could last for months, sometimes a year, without reinforcements (by the way, wikipedia has a nice list of sieges here, both real and fict...
The protagonist sets out on a journey to reach a goal. But the further he gets into the story, the clearer he understands that the odds aren't in his favor. He experiences loss, frustration, anger,...
The horse is not dead yet. Consider tanks. They are a century old technology, so they've been around for a while. Yet they did not kick foot soldiers from the battlefields. There are tasks that ta...
Adding to linksassin's good answer about having a cast of characters rather than a main, I want to point out what you said: The author takes special care of them. Provides them wise thinking. G...
Following the previous question: Characterizing a sentient robot: sensory data I'm writing a robot character with a particular PoV. In the previous question I wanted to talk about sensory data;...
I have a sentient robot in my novel. Truth to be told, I have many. Sentience is somewhat cheap to achieve, meaning that there are multiple artificial beings that can be considered sentient by our...
Let's take for granted that the 3 acts structure is relevant and exists. This, of course, is an assumption. How the three acts relate with the length of the novel? In a standard book - let's say 5...
A substitution cipher is a method used in cryptography to encrypt the meaning of a text. In the most common form, a substitution cipher changes every letter in the target text with another, making...
