Posts by _X_
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
Short answer: yes, with measure and forethought. Note #1: unless karma and universal balance is a defining characteristic of your world, previous bad luck does not count. That's just how our world...
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 ...
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...
TL;DR: * Fear (or equivalent shock) followed by disgust -> horror * disgust alone -> disgust A significant effort in analyzing the concepts of horror, terror and sublime times back to the ...
Only social success imply validation and agreement. It is entirely possible that these are given without verification. A bully may become socially successful when most people in society were not th...
A simile usually implies more than the mere appearance. In the comparison you link two entities that share some features. Sometimes the common elements are marked explicitly, for instance: her ha...
After you're done reading the sonnets, you can check your newly learned words against this reference of Common Words & Phrases in Shakespeare's World: https://learn.lexiconic.net/shakewords.ht...
This kind of killing is never done with a light heart. While you can easily jump over the act itself, you can show the turmoil and torment that goes through the mind of those that have to execute i...
This is probably a variation on other answers. I often ask family and friends what they would do in the situations in which I put my characters, and why they would do so. I struck a conversation o...
European dictatorships left a profound cultural footprint in the local culture, to the point that a certain vocabulary, a certain manner of writing, and even a certain manner of speaking is evocati...
I wrote some steampunk. In the plot, there were some elements that the reader should take as novelty, and they were presented with great emphasis. Other elements were supposed to be common in the w...
I am a happy user of an Underwood 5, an old typewriter from the beginning of the XX century. I use it to type letters, short stories, greeting cards, and labels. I am now planning to try and type...
First, from the description it is clear that these are not three similar characters. In fact, there are two MCs, and another character. The question is "how to make the reader feel that the third c...
To answer your questions. Some famous poets have paired their poems with their own artwork (e.g. William Blake). Most of the famous poets in textbooks don't (or at least not to the level that th...
If you want to be PC, stick to symptoms of infectious diseases, where the sense of body horror would reinforce prevention and be justified as a mean towards avoiding contagion. As the OP suggests,...
Will they come after you? Very unlikely, but not impossible. It's my reader who bothers criminal organizations, it's not me. My reader is what they don't want. The fact that, in this moment, we...
I structured my plot, designed the path to the climax, listed my characters and even outlined some scenes. Then halfway through I got stuck: one minor transition scene just did not make sense. The ...
