Posts by Amadeus
Although I upvote Mark and Alexander, I can suggest an alternative writing trick: Find a way to exchange cause and effect: You are thinking "betrayal" causes "Kicked Out." Instead think of how "Ki...
Who is laughing? Just you, at suckering your readers into caring about a character? Maybe this is not how you read, but most readers are making an investment of time and emotional energy in imagin...
Killing the opposition; even brutally, is an understandable trait of a villain. Mass "impersonal" killing (setting a bomb, firing a missile, exploding a nuclear weapon) are understandable traits, t...
A trope is a cliché setup; of any kind, that audiences have come to expect. An example in a commercial is the great looking guy catching sight of a jaw-dropping girl, dropping everything to approa...
Stephen King doesn't plan his plots; at least according to his book, "On Writing." Perhaps that is more your style (and is what I like, too). King's approach is to write about a problem and do exac...
Your construction is poor. Your first line effectively says "I am ignoring all debate about rationality and applying my own definition, a decision is rational when it satisfies condition X." Why r...
Start over; new file, using what you have as a reference. I've actually done it, put aside nearly 200 pages and begun anew. Your story problem is what I think of as the original "Star Trek" proble...
Try this to break the cycle: Go Analytic! When you begin to doubt, or don't know what to write next, Start a new paragraph with some knots (&&&) and explain why what you wrote doesn't...
The biggest problem I see is that your "prediction" will not be appreciated, and your actual creativity is lost and considered derivative. Suppose I started writing a book about terrorists, hijack...
I think the Supreme Court definition applies; to paraphrase: erotica and pornography are pretty much undefinable but we know it when we see it. If you are describing the genitals or breasts of nak...
Write it anyway. Most authors have to write a few books before they publish one. Don't think your idea is going to be your one and only idea ever. Some of my published work I have rewritten entire ...
One good way to write about Very Important Opinions is to begin in an idyllic world complying with the Very Important Opinions; but one that has been idyllic for so long that they have relaxed thei...
D.E.M. implies an implausible [to the audience] save; and there is no value to that. The minute the audience finds a story development implausible they lose interest; this is the point when they tu...
One writer's opinion: Heroes: Begin here: They engage in altruistic risk and sometimes sacrifice; and the audience sees that. Many Germans that hid Jews from the Nazis did not get caught, so they...
Sometimes this is an intentional clue; for example in The Green Mile, the miracle-performing character is named John Coffey; and Stephen King says he intentionally gave him the same initials as Jes...
No, that would not alienate readers. We've seen this kind of conworld all the way back to Gulliver's Travels, and in more modern form, something like Hogwart's, the TV series Magicians (where they...
I agree with Mark. I also don't care for your example. I don't have the full context, but it seems to me "wicked" is too strong a modifier for "mocking", which I tend to think of as harmless ribbin...
You really can't get a free lunch. If there were a way, it would be overwhelmed by any novice writer capable of Googling, and quickly become useless. That said: The people that do this "for free"...
Answers to this question are obviously going to be pretty opinion based. Here is mine! I look for problems people will struggle to solve, for some reason, because to me this is the essence of a pl...
I am an old writer. My advice is simple: Steal experience! To be more specific, you need to study some existing fiction that is in the best-seller, well-reviewed, or highly acclaimed realm. When I...
We ordered pork belly, beef liver, and lamb slices—a selection that made our tongues melt and our stomachs heat up. We ordered pork belly, beef liver and lamb slices -- a selection we knew wou...
ACTS when the word is used to designate timing in a story, refer to commonly accepted phases of a story line. These phases and what is in them have been observed over tens of thousands of successfu...
You absolutely should add "I Believe" if, without that phrase, you would be making a claim of fact that you cannot be certain is true. Do you have scientific proof that people should eat apples fo...
I believe you should only include angles if they are actually important to the plot; not if they are "artistic." If you need to show a bee flying up Mark's nose, perhaps. But even then, aren't you ...
As said, 1 page (standard format) is estimated at one minute. If you are worried and want a more detailed answer: If your dialogue is particularly dense or complicated, read it aloud with a stop ...
