Posts by _X_
I attempted a password recovery, but it does not seem to work. The error message was: The server encountered a configuration or processing error and was unable to complete your request. Please tr...
In light of recent events, I intended to write a simple letter of complaint to StackExchange. The obvious thing to do would be to write an opening with the fact such as It came to my knowledge ...
Case 1: The opening of the wallet is irrelevant to the story You have already established that the woman has a small wallet from where she pulls out small coins. You can skip all subsequent restat...
Show the visible effects of the pain. Let the reader feel it. I think the issue is that you're being sidetracked into trying to describe the feeling of pain. Pain is a very subjective feeling. It ...
This question is about hiding from the reader the fact that I am skipping some steps. Worse, perhaps, I don't want to show them, and I may have no clue or intention of figuring out how these steps ...
In the ever swinging tone of a novel, one may wish to show a moment of peace amidst all the chaos. In my novel it happens a few times, most notably when characters are travelling across vast natura...
The challenge of the day is to rename your magical process as 'memory erasing' and the person affected as 'memory cleansed' or 'memoryless' (or variations thereof). No more worries about amnesia, e...
Be free, and truthful If there is a truth, speak the truth. If you as an author decide what the truth is in your fictional world, then, again, speak it. You should only be worried about a lie: if ...
A knowledgeable Writing.SE user once said you could write fifty thousand times the word 'meow' and call it a novel. Such a piece of writing would hardly be considered an account of anything, even l...
The frame challenge of the day is whether the world is the villain, or is perceived to be the villain by the MC. Other answers have already covered the case in which the world being a villain is ...
TL;DR The magic is not in the place, but in the characters' reaction to it. The story is told from the POV of the characters. They may find your three main locations interesting, and the places in...
The frame challenge of this question is whether you would like to be read by someone who considers your name to be an important factor in the decision on whether reading your book. If having the l...
Related writing.SE literature: Effective techniques for describing pain How to describe pain in first person? We can break down the problem into separate components. The style Increasing th...
Show it. Using a different spelling is akin to telling: you could similarly just make a recording and ship it with your story. It does not make much sense, right? You could instead show it. Write...
A world with races (or species) so dissimilar from one another, without a continuum between them, ought to be racist. Subverting the trope, which is a trope in itself, is going to just flip the rac...
For some, writing is a job, or a significant part of their job. They write to earn a living. They sometimes write more than needed because they need to put down ideas, streamline thoughts and just ...
I am completely ignorant of LitRPG. It is entirely possible that some reader get pleasure from the insight into these numerical statistics alongside with the plot. The OP question suggests however ...
We use tenses to establish a temporal order between statements and from there derive chronology and causality between facts. If you mess that up, no one will be able to follow the stream of events ...
As far as we know, in our Universe all stories could start from the Big Bang. Or from the primordial soup if we want to stick to living beings on planet Earth. Does it make sense to do so? Imagine...
No drawbacks, except for quoting trademarks, and for setting expectations. Quoting trademarked sentences may be bad "I'm lovin' it." may have the drawback of a fast-food chain sending the...
Focus Summary: choose wisely the necessary "difficult" words that you need to set the tone, the style and the setting, and avoid all the others. The absolute basic is that any story can be told w...
Diagnosis is hard; mirror mood with style Even with the increased sensibility of our times towards these conditions, I would still have a hard time discerning a person with BPD from a random atten...
The bare minimum is not the backstory The bare minimum that you need to show is not the backstory, but whether the MC is convinced about Matt's good character. For instance, Arthur Conan Doyle do...
If removing the frame does not affect the story, then remove it. If the story lacks, then harness the frame. Case I. There is a disconnect between frame and story The epic tale of wars is a fr...
Q. Do I use active verbs or nouns in a job description? The key is brevity. You want your reader to remember the relevant information, without having to process loads of unnecessarily long grammat...
