Activity for Amadeus
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Answer | — |
A: Doubt about a particular point of view on how to do character creation >How can a creation of your mind (a character) do something that you don't imagine? Implications. I will explain! What I imagine when designing my characters is scenes, things they have done in the past, traumatic things that have happened to them, Successes, Failures, and how they have responded ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: What's the difference between time-tested and formulaic? For me, time-tested and formulaic are equivalent; and equate to a lack of surprises, at least for a jaded consumer of fiction. I am a jaded consumer of Television entertainment. I know the formulas, often when watching a movie, hour long or half hour long show, I know who the villain is when they... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Alternatives to develop relationships without dialogue Basically you have to use obvious body language. If you have only 90 seconds, I wouldn't try for much drama, and friendship might be more difficult than something stronger, like love or dislike or irritation. But there are many gestures and actions that indicate intimate relationships, without spe... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: How to integrate letters, in-universe book Snippets and the like into a story My approach to that is, for letters to the POV character, do not forget that you have a human reading. Mechanically, I indent the letter like a quote. (Say your normal margins are 1-inch left, 1-inch right: For the letter, I'd use 1.5-inch left, 1.5-inch right.) But I break that back to normal ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Is there a formula for creating stakes? Stakes come down to emotions, your characters need to have emotions or perhaps in the case of scifi machine characters, something that replaces emotion as a motivating force. +1 Mark Baker, yes these are "desires", but to me "desire" is too generalized. The emotion could be guilt; or romantic l... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: How to deal appropriately with an inappropriate sexual relationship I believe you show, don't tell. This comes down to the design of the personalities involved. The older guy is the big problem. The boys in school can be just unaware of the law, or think (as many do) that it isn't "rape" if the girl started it, or offered sex for money, so they went ahead. And be... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How do I know if my cast is diverse enough or too diverse? I definitely think it can be "too diverse", because ticking every box in the diversity matrix may feel forced and distract from the story itself. Diversity should not be gratuitous. If the story is ABOUT the trials and tribulations of a whole homosexual community, that may be a lot of diversity. T... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How to ensure that neurotic or annoying characters don't get tiring in the long run I would make A grow with the times. If he can see premonitions of his own future, and knows they can be changed, he can see that his freak outs are going to leave him without friends in the near future. A birthday alone. Nobody at his funeral but his brother. He can strive to change things. And lo... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Basing my protagonist on myself In addition to Galastel's answer, I would add the non-writing worry: People that know you, including your brother and family and possibly friends, may read your book and recognize you, themselves, and other characters in the book. Correctly or mistakenly. And then take you to task for putting them in... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: What's "fair use" for borrowing someone else's invented term? +1 @Kris: ACTUALLY, it appears "Grok" is a middle ages version of "Greek" referring to the Greek Language. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22grok%22&tbm=bks&tbs=cdr:1,cdmin:1680,cdmax:1699&lr=langen I upvoted his answer. The Google ngram site looks like a useful research tool for copyright pur... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: I want to make two of my characters fall in love This is an existing answer of mine; which I believe is on-point. https://writing.codidact.com/questions/36209#answer-36211 Basically: Falling in love is generally a combination of sexual attraction, complementarity, and commonality. Friendship (or platonic love) is formed by the last two, mi... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: A.I character that talks using pre-scripted messages. How do i make it seem more relatable? I would find this approach highly unrealistic. For one, those reel-to-reel tape drives do not EVER record sound; they are strictly digital. I worked with them extensively in the 1970's; for a time I was one of many people using computers to predict weather and compute flight plans. Speech synthesis f... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How to convey that the POV character *does not understand* what's said in dialogue? I don't like reading made up languages, I'm going to skip over them anyway. So I seldom write more than a word. My approach is to keep the POV character thinking and analyzing what she can, which I find more realistic. For example, >Carol spoke at length to David in a language I didn't understa... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How do I introduce a large cast in an interesting way +1 Mark, Galastel. The one thing I would add is structural. Don't forget that the first 15% of a book, before the Inciting Incident (that introduces the major problem), is where the reader expects to be introduced to the main characters and crew (not necessarily the villains, unless you are writing f... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: What innovative techniques can make a textbook for learning a foreign language "pop"? I imagine, as Lauren says, you need simple sentences, but they don't have to be boring. >Xiao Li lost his trousers. He politely asked his manager if he could return home for more trousers. His manager thought this an excellent idea, and politely informed Xiao Li his employment was terminated. >... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Pantsing a story? I am a "pantser", or as we PREFER to be called, a Discovery Writer. So is Stephen King. I typically begin a story without knowing the ending, or the plot, or all of the characters. What I do have is a very strong idea of a main character, that my story will be about. She is usually female, and ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Has self-publishing killed the in-person critique group? I have never tried for a group, for some of the "downside" reasons DPT outlined. I have found readers that enjoy my work, and aren't writers but avid fiction consumers. My rule for critique is basically that I need help finding errors or problems, so I am really hoping they can help point at parts th... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Tools to overcome a block from: "My words are bad" I'll offer a frame challenge here. Personally, I embrace the rewrite, and the deletion. I recently finished a long novel, a year-long project, and by my count, I read the whole thing twenty times. Some parts, like the opening and climax scenes, I probably read fifty times. A story about Hemingway ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: What determines genre? Another answer (in addition to my old answer): One approach is that your agent/publisher is going to want to know what other book yours is like, specifically "This book will appeal to readers of The Hunger Games", or something like that. (That can be very difficult for me; I have very limited free... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How shall we handle our old (imported) content? I'd say if they (Q) were closed before, open them and give them a downvote, and if they get "enough" downvotes (3? 5?) close them. I would like the same for both Q and A. SE had a "review queue", ours would just be downvoted questions. For answers, I'd say any answer with 2+ downvotes should be hi... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How I should handle gender-neutral pronouns in technical writing? I would write around it this way: Original: When the user requests for their visit and order to be registered in their account, a checkin is created at POS. Sounds awkward to me. Presuming POS means "Point of Sale" and not "Piece of ..." okay it can't mean that. Is "checkin" "Check in"? Whateve... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Is a lawful good "antagonist" effective? Yes, you can have both. In the Fugitive 1993 film Tommy Lee Jones is a Federal Marshall pursuing wrongly-convicted Harrison Ford, and Tommy Lee is pulling out every legal trick he can to catch Harrison and return him to prison. Harrison is innocent, the audience saw that and knows that. He was fra... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Email subscription Hi Mark; I had a similar observation; I proposed a new tab with some daily "random questions" from the archive, which we might be able to review and answer (or at least upvote Qs and As). We've got this ton of imported content that is basically useless, some of which could use better answers from wi... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
| Question | — |
Questionable Promotions! I notice we have a dearth of activity on this site. With a relatively small number of active users, perhaps we can add a tab to the "Questions" Page. We have Activity, Age, Score as sorting algorithms. How about a "Lottery" tab? Once a day, randomize the questions we have, and use that as the o... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Writing slurred speech I"ve actually just written a scene in a novel, in which a recent stroke victim slurs her speech. But I don't try for "realism" in this, I write her dialogue straight; but the characters she is talking to struggle with what she is saying. At the beginning, she apologizes for sounding like she's jus... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: In a dialogue, how can I hint that the characters aren't telling the whole truth? The way you've set it up, with C being a trusting character, if you want the Reader to know something is up, you find a sweet spot of them saying something that most Readers would get, but C does not. I'd suggest code talking. That is taken to comical effect in gangster movies, but code talking is... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How do I distinguish between self-doubt and objective recognition of fault? To me, the recognition of an actual fault is specific, I can point to exactly what is wrong and state exactly why it is wrong. While self-doubt, for me, is generally vague. e.g. What if this is like a hundred other stories? Are my turning points too weak, maybe not justified enough? Should I cut the ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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Formatting Progress while writing an Answer On SE, as we write our answers the formatted text appears below it; a what-you-see-is-what-you-get image. That helps me, at least, tell if I have unclosed Bold or Italics, if my links are working, if my line spacing is correct, etc. I just noticed, writing an answer to a question, that we don't... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Why does the second act 'reaction' and then 'action' need to be drawn out? The "Why" is that we want the MC (Main Character, or Main Crew) to undergo some sort of struggle in order to get from the end of the Act I to the beginning of Act III. Because that is what makes the story interesting; A seemingly difficult problem, it cannot be a walk in the park (or maybe it is but ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Ending a line of dialogue with "?!": Allowed or obnoxious? I don't have a problem with '?!', I think people understand it, so it is fair game. I would have a problem with the interrobang ('‽'). If I ran across that in a book it would drop me out of my reading reverie just as much as reading 'hxywsxv', in other words I wouldn't have any clue what it meant,... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: A Code of Conduct, dare I say it It's too long, and it's filled with squishy prescriptions. Yes, we won't tolerate harassment. But I think it is a mistake to try and define every possible form of harassment. Make it a law of intent, not of specifics. (It's a real thing, laws of intent, and the "intent" of a perpetrator is deter... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: The excessive use of 'and' Usually "and" is indeed dispensable and the fact that you wrote it is a clue to check if it is. Using that sentence as an example, I can eliminate "and" with a semicolon, or a period. > Usually "and" is indeed dispensable; the fact that you wrote it is a clue to check if it is. > > Usually "and" is... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: What are the reasons behind Writer's block? I think Writer's Block occurs differently for different writers. For myself, the main cause of Writer's Block is in what I've already written; somehow it prevents me from writing the next scene, without being boring or repetitive. If I don't think it's interesting, no chance at all a reader will thin... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: In academic writing why do some recommend to avoid "announcing" the topic? In this answer, I am going to explain to you why you shouldn't announce what you are about to write anyway. It is boring and redundant and a waste of real estate on the page. Start with a claim, or a key observation. Those can be interesting. Don't talk about your paper in your paper, get to your p... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Questioning Plagiarism Rules I am not a lawyer, but in general words are copyrighted; ideas are not. The context doesn't really matter too much, if the words are unique and convey the same idea for a different topic (which these almost definitely do), then you do not have the right to copy them! There is no excuse like "I was ta... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Questionable behavior by editor There were multiple proper courses of action. 1) Refuse to let him publish it under your name, and retract permission to use the paragraphs you wrote. You did not write it, it was a first person narrative and not your words, publishing it under your name could be considered libel, attributing words ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How can one "treat writing as a job" even though it doesn't pay? Stephen King, in a live interview, was asked "What advice do you have for people that want to write?" His answer (I am repeating from memory) was: "They should write. But I have to tell you, most of the people that say they want to write for a living, do not really want that. They want to HAVE WRI... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: When am I using "I" too much? Is "my" and "me" prohibited? > I stood up and began to walk across the room. She turned away at my approach. > > My urge was to comfort her. Standing up and walking across the room, she turned away from me. Other than that, I'd say buy a book and read the guy. (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: What is a discovery writer? I am a discovery writer. The main and broad definition is that a discovery writer does not outline stories beat by beat, or chapter by chapter, or even Act by Act. The reason for this, as I found for myself about 35 years ago, and have heard from many other discovery writers, is a psychological quir... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Will an unrealistic character be out of place among other realistic ones? You need a motivation, insanity is not a motivation. What you are proposing will break the suspension of disbelief. Does the character think it is funny? Do they have a grudge and just want to passively aggressively satisfy it? Are they in love and trying to tease her to get her attention or make he... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Is the genre 'fantasy' still fantasy without magic? There is also a genre called "Science Fantasy", also "Hard Fantasy" (borrowing from "Hard Science Fiction", which doesn't break any laws of physics) and of course just plain "Science Fiction". The genres with "Fantasy" in the name, even without magic, may have for example Dragons, not as magical cre... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Subfigures in a figure, how to label? Within the figure description itself, just use (i), (ii), (iii), etc.or (A), (B), (C), (D) to save space. In the text of your paper, refer to Figure 2(i), Figure 2(ii), or Figure 2(A), Figure 2(B). As in (for figure description): > Figure 2: (A) reflex, (B) recoil As in (for body text): > In Fig... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Outlining the climax made me lose interest in writing the actual story I am a discovery writer, I have been for many years, and I complete stories. Scrap your outline. Most discovery writers (including me) have struggled with what you are talking about; finding the climax, resolving the character arcs, dead-end "mysteries" that we could never figure out. The so... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Is quality of writing subjective, or objective? Writing is judged both objectively and subjectively. Bad grammar, bad spelling, generic labels, clichés, etc can be objectively identified. Long passages of uninterrupted dialog can be objectively identified, long preambles without any action can be identified. Deus ex Machinas can be objectively id... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Books in a trilogy are significantly different lengths. What to do? First, I would always presume if you "put a book aside" to work on another book, your book is dead. In my experience (with only myself and a few authors I have spoken with), putting a book in the drawer is a kiss of death. Work on until you think it is ready to publish, then try to publish it. It is ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Naming characters: Physical v. Personality This is an opinion question. My opinion is that people are generally given names. Some later decide to reject their given name, and name themselves, but for the most part it is their parents that decide their name, not them. All my sisters (and myself) have names given by my parents: One has the sam... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How can I research non-recent 21st century cultural events? I don't know if it exists in your country, but as a graduate student in the USA, I once researched 3 years worth of newspaper headlines in four "national" papers (e.g. The New York Times), and I found those all in free online archives. My goal was different (looking for major news stories headlined i... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Should a scene break always be put in place when there is change in location, times, and dates? It is permissible, as long as it is obvious to the reader that is what happened. That said, personally, I put in a scene break, which I can be certain is obvious to the reader. Just three asterisks (or dashes, your preference) centered on a line. I can't understand why any writer would be averse to ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Help creating a name for a series Since your book is about a young girl coming to understand the world they way it is (which sounds much like a coming-of-age story for a teen or pre-teen, or perhaps a coming-to-adulthood story for an MC in their 20's); I suggest you focus on a metaphor for learning or transition. The Twilight series ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: Using footnotes in fiction: children's book which can be enjoyed by adults I agree with the answer by @motosubatsu, +1. What I would add is it seems you are not really writing a children's story, which just doesn't demand very challenging concepts for them. I think you are writing a story for adults and trying to disguise it as a children's story, to slip it under the rada... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |