Posts by Amadeus
First, I would not say a hook has to be in the first 300 words (a normal published page is about 250 words). Anybody that picks up a book with the intent of reading it will give you more credit tha...
Author's choice. +1 Secespitus for voicing my own thoughts. However, I will note that in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone; the first book in the series, Chapter 1 is set ten years before Chap...
I should think your villain is not well developed, or your hero is not sufficiently motivated. What has the hero been doing all this time, and why does s/he see the villain as a threat? What has th...
The conjunction 'for' has fallen out of favor, what modern people say is "because". However, if your character was raised in an isolated community or circumstance that continue to speak like people...
All else being equal, is a positive desire/goal/motivation (of the main character) more 'hooky' for the reader than a negative desire/etc? Personally, I think this must be the wrong question b...
This does answer the OP's question: As I said in my answer, and added P.S. and P.P.S, and comments later, the only requirement is that something (significant) be original, which can include charact...
Take things that happen every time with regularity, and make them not happen, so you can remember the last time they did not happen. For example, consume things; I have a regular morning routine I...
Use the real name. I do this all the time, in my current writing the main character (a female) is often spying to gain information, and pretends to be a fictitious person to do it. My narrator al...
Two real-psych possibilities, Destructive Cult Syndrome and capture-bonding. Destructive Cult Disorder. From the wiki: Robbins and Anthony, who had historically studied a condition similar to...
I am a PhD and former professor. The purpose of the citation is to allow the reader to access the source material and read it for themselves. I have noticed some academic papers cite blogs and ev...
+1 Fayth85. I have seen more than my fair share of the dead, including three of my own family members (in three separate incidents). The best you can say is if your character has some experience w...
I wouldn't worry about it. If the scene cannot be shorter, then it is up to the director to break it up somehow, and that can include changing the camera angle, focusing on something else (stage bu...
I do not think desires should be communicated directly in exposition, and only rarely in thoughts, but they can often be communicated somewhat directly through dialogue, especially dialogue with ne...
+1 Alexander. I would add the following observation: The book is about the transformation a character is going through, what is commonly called an "arc" but is in essence a change. Sometimes a lite...
Physical measurements seldom make any difference to the plot, and (IMO) it is an amateur mistake to imagine any character, male or female, with too specific a set of measurements. Breast size, hip...
Keep in mind basic sexual psychology differences between men and women. It depends on the era, and culture. With the caveat that nothing applies to everybody and you can find some 15% of just abou...
Do not say "written boldly", everybody knows what a "football shirt" looks like. A "football shirt" is a "jersey", the reader will know it is a football jersey by any single mention of football. ...
Authors often look to synonym dictionaries to find words different than what first occurs to them, but this is generally NOT to achieve rhythm, but to find a more accurate or evocative word for wha...
How is far more important than What. Look at successful entertainments (by how many they sell, not whether critics loved them or not), and the settings are mostly standard fare, many of them set in...
I wouldn't worry much about style, I strongly disagree with your critic. I wouldn't say there is a "most important component" because there are a few elements that must be there no matter what. T...
These are style questions and mostly a matter of opinion; but if the matching is intended to help the user recognize the key, then if I were writing a manual I would match the italics, and if possi...
TV series, if they take outside scripts (some are only written internally), will sometimes have "protected characters" and "protected topics", that may not even be the main character, but your stor...
I think it is some kind of directorial or camera direction, and I don't recognize it as a standard one. If it is what I think it means, you are directing, and wasting a line (which counts as time i...
Look at The Stand (by Stephen King), Tolkien. Send your characters on a journey. I haven't read the above in decades, but they have many characters (far more than eight) and you can follow their p...
This does not really answer the question, but solves the dilemma in the interest of producing better writing. Reading earlier comments and your replies, you seem intent on an info dump and forcing...
