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This answer follows the APA style, other styles may apply, without loss of generality. A possible workflow to resolve your problem would be, in order: 1. Check if there is a "how to cite" section...
Question: Is there a resource that categorizes existing fiction works by themes based on the authors' demographics (e.g. gender, age, historical period, geographical location, etc...)? For instanc...
Be Socrates In my view the champion of frame challenges is Socrates. His famous method always starts with an attempt at a frame challenge. The success of the Socratic method stands on the basis t...
In the short passage I am writing, the starting point is that one character is being held at gunpoint, and the end point is that she now holds the gun, having disarmed the opponent. The idea is t...
It is a matter of uniformity. So, in your case, yes: every chapter should "blow the reader away". Chapters are parts of a bigger work where there is an expectation of both continuity of scope and...
A rule-of-thumb is that characters may become part of the past only in their universe, where they are a "real" person. In this case, you can use the past-tense if you are referring to a "previous v...
I sometimes write poetry. The creative process for the first draft can be summarized in these steps: I first choose a global structure (e.g. a ballad, a sonnet, a free-stanza-but-fixed-verse, etc...
For the recent writing exercise I wanted to tackle Beowulf's character. In the original saga, the hero Beowulf comes to the aid of king Hrothgar to defeat two monsters. Then, after a period of 50 ...
We all have seen at least one of these clickbaits (or some variation thereof): "single mom discovers the meaning of life with a simple trick" or "billionaires don't want you to know this...
I am looking for the representative references on writing style in English that would pre-date Strunk and White's The Elements of Style (possibly in the period between 1750 - 2000). I would like to...
If you wish to deal with specific categories of people who have specific keyword triggers, then you could work your way into a fancy description of your activity: I write titillating stories th...
I gave my latest book to my favorite beta readers, and they liked it except for the very ending, i.e. the last 20 pages, which they thought fell short and a bit rushed. I therefore decided to try a...
I'm writing a scene in which four characters play a high-stakes poker game. So far my narrator has been an omniscient third person, who just does not wish to enter into the characters' heads. I st...
I have been intending to create a book for toddlers with basic scientific notions in it. Most books for this target readership that I have seen present whatever content in the form of a story, quit...
Sometimes in the process of writing dialogue, I wish to insert a joke in the exchange. I could copy an existing joke, or I could come up with one. The latter option seems preferable if I could tie ...
I decided to give a try to the snowflake method. The idea is that you gradually expand the story from a blurb into a full draft. This question stems from the character-characterization step, but it...
Embrace it instead, and make the reader suffer for having even thought of it What you have there is a reader's commitment to a goal. They expect two characters to get together from page 1, and in ...
1. The issue In my opinion the issue is a strong prevalence of telling rather than showing. All I read in the OP was the description of some fancy lava lamp. To a reader it does not strike any em...
TL;DR, Give him the same personal traits as the here nameless human subject discussed in some of Anna Arendt's writings: a mediocre self-contented clown in need of constant approval from a group o...
This is not based on studies. It is instead just the subjective experience of plainly and painstakingly having to read through documentations of different sorts throughout the years. Documenta...
This would be a great occasion for an extended simile. Take the action and characterize the important elements by comparison to natural events. E.g. The scattering of matter after the big bang, or ...
Hide their goals. You are writing about professionals. They would be less than amateurs in their line of business if they were to reveal their goal so easily. In fact, revealing one's goal gives t...
As of today, it cannot be done in one pass from within Scrivener. I did spend a good amount of time researching this, and I discovered that Scrivener does not support GNU extensions in regex. On t...
In a professional email the document title (and perhaps the date when it was shared) is a sufficient reference. I am assuming that the document was either shared by email, or given in a meeting, a...
The other answers have given you great suggestions about understanding motivation and getting to work. You now need a calendar. Decide on your blog post frequency, as you have done, and plan your ...
