Posts by Amadeus
I have both a resume and a CV; I am a research scientist with a PhD and two Master's degrees. Both a resume and a CV are telling a prospective employer what you can do for them, and how you can be...
As Mark says, not without a track record of one bestseller after another. But if you got that, you should be pretty rich, so why bother? Rowling and Stephen King probably don't worry about stuff li...
I think it is pretty easy, even as a true story. Pick your story, and try Intro, Complication, Try, Resolution. One or two sentences each. Here are two 80 word solutions. When I was ten, my all...
The abstract is a short description of the paper as a whole: e.g. with one or two sentences each: The specific area of interest your problem lies in The specific problem in that area your paper w...
What he means is avoid lengthy preamble and explanation for a story setup, but really it is hard to understand "start as close to the end as possible" without understanding story structure in gener...
You format it with tags, it won't interrupt the flow. "What?!" Marcia said. I laughed, giving her a minute to process my words. "You're getting married?" she said. "I never thought I'...
I believe you have to explain it, somehow. There is nothing worse than an unexplained major action that determines the outcome of the story, especially when the outcome is sad. It seems arbitrary a...
Why this is difficult. Jealousy is a natural trait, nearly everyone that falls in love is subject to it at some time. The reason is that the extremely high emotional value of the love interest cre...
+1, Wetcircuit, though I will disagree on the Buffy angle; she is right on the misdirection. This is difficult to pull off. The way I would do it is a little "close up magic"; you have to write fr...
You could play them as opposites. He hardly talks at all, she talks enough for both of them! She is not unaware or oblivious to him, but she just chatters along, asking him questions that he doesn...
In your particular circumstance: No. That is not normal. If I am given something to provide feedback, then I will read it all; OR I will read it all until I have seen enough to not bother reading ...
First, good for you, it is a good sign that you aren't feeling compelled to describe characters. To me, physical descriptions stalls the story, it is a lot of "telling", not showing. I always avoi...
I used cleaned up speech; but I only use words I have actually heard people use in casual speech (or at least feel like I have heard used). I think the trick is to stick with things real people sa...
Personally, I'd be leery of writing a book with an ending in which the good guy is betrayed, fails and dies, which is your back story. If evil prevails, then I would prefer to refer to it later. S...
+1 DPT, yes your characters should be interacting with the setting. If the "entire thing could have been a phone call", I'd say you have a problem with the dialogue, and the character emotions. D...
I've been a professional programmer for 40 years, I've written everything from operating systems to business app code to games, and I never use an exclamation point in business or OS code. Ever. No...
Consider the Self the axiomatic being. An axiom, in science, is something we take as self-evidently true. It is axiomatic that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line: It needs...
The thing is, readers don't care about non-human perspectives, If you believe that, then why in the world would they buy your next three books? You have essentially told us that, you believe ...
In most technology books, a chapter tackles a single subject in depth. For example, "looping" in a language, the FOR loop; WHILE loop, DO WHILE, DO UNTIL, etc. In beginner books, syntax and the r...
A person acting out of charity or selflessness is aiming to help somebody more than they help themselves, and would take such an act even if nobody knew they did. Just recently viewing news of Hurr...
Mike's career is over either way, and his choice is selfish and self-centered. If he can hack the SETEV, hack it in a way that forces the rest of the crew off it, then steal it, so he is the ONLY ...
You can create a character that is a fraud, and seems to have inherent weaknesses, but once in a while they act out of character and against their supposed weakness, in some situation that is criti...
I would say the "Black Moment" is anywhere from the 50% to 75% mark in the story. I would prefer "Darkest Hour", and instead of "Point of Death" the "Last Chance". The Darkest Hour is when the MC ...
If you want to see conventions; look to action flicks like Die Hard or Taken (or dozens of others). There is your standard ticking bomb. There is the bad guy escaping -- Willis must find a way to...
I agree, subtext is something the author does throughout the work, in various ways. It is not necessarily a psychological leaning of their own, it can be an explicitly formulated principle. Nearly ...
