Posts by Evil Sparrow
Welcome to the resurrected (again) Writing Challenge! In line with previous ones, this includes a topic, a prompt, and also a challenge. Topic The topic of this challenge is a difficult jou...
In one scene, I have a conversation between three characters: A, B and C. A's son and B are involved in something illegal. C isn't aware, and since A and B aren't entirely sure she can be trusted, ...
Carlos picked at his macaroni and cheese, trying not to look up at the picture on the wall. Grandma set down her fork and looked at him, frowning. "What's wrong? You liked that the last time you we...
Some managers, Lucy thought, need to have their meeting privileges revoked. She fidgeted and looked at the clock in the corner of her screen: 5:34 PM. The Tuesday afternoon meeting had been schedul...
Brianna slouched in her seat, staring out the window, the worksheet on her desk forgotten. There were hundreds of things she could think of to do on a beautiful May afternoon, and none of them invo...
One of my characters gets drunk and accidentally kills another. He has a couple of lines where he needs to sound obnoxiously, falling-down drunk. Is there a good way to accomplish this? What sound...
In the last two hours, Stan Woodward had learned to truly hate Christmas carols. Just before the crash he'd been punching the buttons on the radio, trying to find a station that was playing real m...
I wouldn't recommend this. Anything that appears in quotation marks is meant to be taken literally. When I first read your example, my first thought was that Celine was talking - and actually sayi...
A dialogue of mine contains the following sentence: "You fired all three of them?!" Trouble is, I'm not sure I've ever seen a novel that used a question mark and an exclamation point together...
The end of the school week came as a relief for Megan McAllister, and she was looking forward to going home and doing something fun. She lounged in the back of the car, staring up at the sky and tr...
Two characters (one is a PoV character) come up with a plan to break a third out of prison. They succeed, with only minor complications. If I describe too many details of their plan beforehand, it ...
I notice we aren't getting a lot of new questions on here yet. Last summer we had a series of writing challenges in Meta, like this one: https://writing.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2127 I'd like to ...
The problem with your description doesn't seem to be the word count, but a lack of conflict. Sesquipedalias has the right idea - it feels like you've described something that isn't important to you...
If you're trying to have it feel less like the second description is interrupting the first, I'd recommend pulling out the description of B (the classroom) and making its own paragraph, establishin...
I'm writing 2 stories simultaneously. The first one spans 17 years. The second picks up where the first left off... but only about 25% of the way in. The sequel seems to work best if I introduce ...
Welcome to the latest Writing Challenge! In line with the previous one, this includes a topic, a prompt, and also a challenge. Topic The topic of this challenge is finding treasure. This mi...
(This is a sort of prequel to 2 stories I entered in last year's writing challenges.) Technical Difficulties 0 The ship streaked across the morning sky, spewing smoke. Inside, the pilot clawed at ...
It helps if you use something else instead of quotation marks for the telepathic dialogue. For example: <Don't worry, the SWAT team is already on their way.> Parentheses and italics can do ...
Some of my characters have little to no education, and I'm looking for ways to show that through their dialogue. (They're uneducated, but not necessarily stupid.) Here's what I've tried so far: ...
One of my characters has a flashback to when he was 5 years old. At the time, he didn't have a name (he goes by a physical description instead). What's the correct way to refer to him in this flash...
Using more compound sounds is a good start. Part of your problem comes from the syllables you're using - most of them are only 1 or 2 letters. The longest of your sample names is all of 5 letters -...
There's a third issue that affects both of them, something so serious that both of them need to set aside their own agendas and team up to deal with it. This gives them a chance to know each other...
(Warning: I haven't actually read Beowulf.) Option #3 sounds like your strongest choice. Start by accepting the myth as fact: leave all his initial deeds as they are, and assume he acted in charac...
What strikes me is the lack of detail. I'm having trouble picturing the scene with what's given. There's more to a scene than just action. A character who's in danger shouldn't notice much besides...
