Posts by Amadeus
Is there any possible way to do it right, without foreshadowing it so hard that the twist is moot? I would say ... No. But you can write the story, without letting your MC agree to call it mag...
you are weakening your argument by presenting the extreme edge of the phenomenon you wish to engage with rather than its mainstream. That can be true, at one extreme (IRL) people get out and p...
No, it is not too much (I agree with Galastel). If you are feeling it is too much, I suspect your story is underdeveloped, or under-imagined. You need more scenes to illustrate the transitions smo...
I think this is an opinion piece, but IMO the protagonist is a hero, and the scientist is a villain, and the ending is a mixed bag. For starters, anybody trying to coerce everybody against their w...
I don't know Murakami, so I think it depends on how "trademark" his style is. If it is particularly unique, I wouldn't want to be seen as an obvious imitation. But if it is just good writing, I'd...
I would say no. The phobias are more in the realm of irrational fears, not rational ones. So she might develop coulrophobia, but she doesn't have it just because she got raped by somebody dressed a...
Imagine the Nurse is a lesbian. In WW2 and in the military she wouldn't be "out", but it isn't like lesbians did not exist back then. Her fiancé is a ruse; I know single lesbians that still wear a ...
I would write it G, but you could write it Gi or Gee, if you like either of those better. This may be a "matter of opinion" question. In comments, there is a complaint "Gi" could be pronounced wit...
You need a prop. I will explain! Somebody fighting a losing argument is typically fighting because the consequences for them of losing the argument is giving up something valuable or dear to them,...
I'm a discovery writer. I provide a lot of detail on beginning a story as a discovery writer, in this answer. When I began I tried to be a plotter, but it didn't work; my creativity was used up in...
No, they are not all of them. This is a common game, there are many books claiming there are 3 plots, 7 plots, 12 plots, 21 plots, 23 plots, whatever. You could say there is only one plot: Charact...
Stories do not require growth of a character; there are many series (Detective series being the most prevalent) in which the MC doesn't really change much at all, even if they do have emotional exp...
Is a plot twist still a "twist" if my reader knows it? It is not a surprise, but it is still a twist. Readers can only guess at things, they cannot know anything for certain until they have re...
The 8-point arc: Stasis (Normal World) Trigger (Inciting Incident) The quest (Leaving the Normal World) Surprise[s] (actions complicating/learning the problem) Critical choice (Understanding, the...
Yes, it is fine to leave a character's age vague. If your story includes tales from the past, historical events readers would know, or scenes of interactions with other characters from years ago (l...
I think it is a mistake to write half a book as a grim fantasy, then have a twist that undoes that. To me, I am disappointed if the author builds up a dire scenario that suddenly fizzles out, the h...
For example, while writing an erotic scene, is it important for the author to feel the same way as they expect the readers to feel when describing the scene? For some subjective feelings or em...
One such strategy is to have your villain, on more than one occasion, actual act against his own best interest and defeat his own plot, kill his own men, etc, in order to convince the hero (and the...
I think it is fine to shift, but I think you need a marker of some sort to ensure the reader is aware of whose POV they are in. This could be done in prose, but it might be easier to just use the ...
I would add one word to that (then I'll tell you why): Visa squared his shoulders, knowing Reino respected confidence. An opinion is part of somebody's internal life; and how they see the wor...
For me, the midpoint is indeed when I shift from a reactive phase to a proactive phase, but I still need a scene, a dramatic event, that triggers this change of perspective for the MC (Main Charact...
I don't think it is too long, I write chapters nearly that long. Some readers (even my own) complain that they use chapters to gauge their progress through the story and as stopping points, and ve...
at what point to ask for constructive critisism. It depends on how you write. Some people plot out their novels in great detail, every foreshadowing, plot turn and twist. They know their chara...
Inventing new words, including by compounding, is supposed to be clever, or indicate a new concept that should have its own word, sometimes by linking two words that were previously independent mod...
Although +1 to Cyn, I would write it as prose, with italics for the words and the commonly used descriptions or character representations of any emoticons (since more than a handful of graphics is ...
