Posts by Evil Sparrow
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 ...
(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 ...
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...
In one chapter, the PoV character meets up with her sister. Her sister is supposed to be fairly stuck-up and thinks she's a complete lowlife, so she talks down to her the whole time. I have the Po...
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...
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...
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...
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: ...
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...
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 ...
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, ...
I'm having trouble trying to claim my content. If I go to "Edit Profile", click "Authenticate", and sign in to SE, I get: redirect_uri is not under the registered domain for this application I ...
Something about the character's physical appearance doesn't seem quite right. If I recall correctly, the hallucinations in A Beautiful Mind never aged - that's how the MC was eventually able to te...
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...
In my experience, characters generally feel flat and unnatural when they're there to fill a role in the story, instead of being allowed to act like themselves. Meaning, the events are written the w...
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...
A story of mine has the following sentence: Alyssa was possessed by a sudden, fierce urge to snatch the teacup out of her sister's hand and dump the contents into her perfectly arranged hai...
In my experience, writing by hand is better for brainstorming and first drafts, and typing is better for editing later drafts. I usually work out new ideas on paper - I tend to have a lot of ques...
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...
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...
"Strong" isn't always about having the biggest muscles, and not all conflicts are physical. (Likewise, giving a male character the ability to lift heavy objects doesn't mean he can't be whiny and a...
How does your fantasy race view humans? They don't like us. In their legends, we're stupid, brutish and disgusting - basically, "human" is their version of "troll". In this case, I'd recommend co...
