Posts by Amadeus
In 3rd person limited, which you are writing it, it is perfectly valid to describe what somebody is feeling, like panic, or horror, or anger, or whatever. That includes pain. It seems like you feel...
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-i...
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...
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, ...
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'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", o...
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 Harr...
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 n...
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 pas...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 d...
Whatever language your readers speak, they expect your book to be "translated" into that language. I write in English for English speakers, I have written stories set in the ancient past where the...
Analysis obviously has to include objective news as the subject of the analysis, but it is not necessarily opinion. For example, News might quote the President, or a candidate. Analysis might take...
I do not think this is a good strategy at all; for the same reason Galastel has cited: It is anti-climactic. There are no consequences to the drama, and the reader feels deceived by the narrator. T...
One of my characters, a kind of spy, goes by several names in the course of her story. The narrator always refers to her by her real name. I make sure she introduces herself by whatever cover name ...
You don't have to PLOT, you just need to realize, as you discover the story, that you have somebody plotting against them. Then, as we write, this is something we keep in mind (and perhaps notes). ...
No, a story does not need a villain. There are many stories in which a person struggles against nature, struggles to survive, struggles to invent something new, etc. All the story requires (to be...
What scares people is the threat of disaster they cannot control, or anticipate, that they are helpless to do anything about. Their fear is of impending loss, which includes injury, death, loss of ...
For a video game: One approach to being post-racial is to just have racial mixing. As many cultures today are, due to migrations (forced by slavery or not) and inter-mixing of genes. We have had t...
How do you escalate a story's plot after killing the Big Bad? A Series? It sounds like you plot a series. For those, from the beginning your intent should be to defeat a new villain in each s...
Even actors that play dead people in films get credit. A murdered hooker or mugging victim, for example, on a cop show. I am not sure about unnamed extras in a crowd scene, or shopping mall or stre...
If the majority of readers don't get it, the dots are too far apart. Writing is like humor, in this respect. If the majority of your audience doesn't laugh at your jokes, then you aren't funny. F...
I have published several peer-reviewed scientific papers, also Master's Theses in two different disciplines and a long doctoral dissertation. Your proposed rule is not one I have ever followed, and...
