Posts by Amadeus
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 lik...
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 algori...
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 th...
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 n...
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 man...
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. ...
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 int...
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 "...
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 ...
In general, do not give a laundry list of features. The reason for this is you are asking the reader to memorize a lot of stuff that is disconnected from the story. In order to connect their featu...
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, ...
I'm not giving you examples because you cannot ask "what to write" here. So these are guidelines on writing, given a character. I usually begin with a character. For me, a good character needs to ...
The new cultures stimulate the imagination. The problems are new, the ways of solving problems are new, what the culture allows is new. Perhaps the technology is new, or so old that we cannot use e...
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,...
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 i...
I don't think reader's necessarily like characters for their names. It is true that the poetry of some names seem to imply more altruistic, or harmless, or villainous intent. Frodo Baggins just doe...
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 formul...
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...
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 fu...
Yes, you are doing something wrong. Typically the first thing you think of for a story is not where a story should start, because story ideas begin with big dramatic moments, reveals, discoveries,...
I peer review many papers; half a dozen this year. If it is defined before the first use (e.g. "For brevity we use 'randvar' to specify random variables, 'logvar' to specify logical variables.") t...
I include detail because I think the job of the prose is to assist the imagination of the reader. If there is resonance on other levels, that's great, but it isn't a necessity in my book. The read...
Unless you are a famous author with a track record of finishing books, publishers are going to judge you based on the first book, alone. Each book in a trilogy (or longer series) has to stand on it...
YES, the first page is vitally important. But probably not in the way you think. Don't bring the "thriller" up first. The first page (and first sentence, and paragraph) is important in the same w...
I'm a research scientist and professor at a university. We tolerate exactly this "rather curious approach" to research, of multiple refinements until we zero in on something interesting. We do expe...
