Posts by Amadeus
Personally I use Latex, more specifically pdflatex, which is free to download. It is text-based, learning it will probably take a week or two, but there are online examples and help through StackEx...
In my view what makes a character irredeemable is doing something that cannot ever be forgotten, that they cannot atone for even by sacrificing their own life. But that also becomes a matter of o...
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...
I don't think it is too much. Many characters have "double lies", and in a way one can block the other. You say the deep lie won't make your MC fail in action, but that isn't true: You say the MC c...
I include detail because I think the job of the prose is to assist the imagination of the reader. If there is resonance on other levels, that's great, but it isn't a necessity in my book. The read...
I agree with Mark Baker, and Chris Sunami. It sounds like a scam. We have an equivalent thing in Academia, unfortunately it IS common for scientific journals to charge authors for publication, and...
I don't think readers notice 3rd person view as another character observing the MC. I have read many books written in 3PL (3rd person limited; narrator only knows the thoughts and feelings of the ...
A method like time of day is very constricting, and becomes more like a disability than an advantage. Consider werewolves that convert, like it or not, on the full moon. It has been used as a story...
Okay, first your example: In the middle of an argument it doesn't make sense for one person to stop and explain a lot of stuff, and for the other person to stop and listen. That is why your "succin...
Is it a good idea to leave those things to the reader's imagination? No. This is not good writing, to compare something we know to something we don't know is backwards, at best the reader will m...
You can resolve the conflict as you want, and either Character A does not break his vow, or he breaks it but realizes the vow was in error. Character B is a "a pompous, selfish, power hungry, narc...
As a discovery writer myself, I do not "plot", but I always write with an ending in mind. I do not WRITE the ending, but I have notes on how the story can be resolved, and I make sure my story will...
Whatever the person is hearing is not included at all (unless it is on speakerphone), and whatever the person on the phone says is put down just like any other utterance, in quotes, not italicized,...
I think its a good idea, and it makes sense. Say a man is aware during an evil possession, and he sees the demon intentionally in front of a mirror, using his body to rape and torture the wife he l...
You can't do just "dumb." You can write a mentally impaired character, like Lenny in "Of Mice and Men," that does dumb things that cause complications out of an inability to understand. Stephen Kin...
Why not just give yourself an alternate identity altogether? You can go register a DBA (Doing Business As, also called an "Assumed Name"), it becomes a legal name you can use, you can have separate...
For writing fiction, I don't use semicolons in dialogue (spoken or thoughts) and I don't use it in prose. That said, I am in Galastel's camp on other forms of punctuation indicating to the reader...
I will agree with both Anna Fitgerald and Viktor Katzy: First, as Viktor says, I don't think saving the sociopathy for the end is a good idea, and Second, as Anna says, if the narrator knows her ...
A love interest is not the only reason to risk life and limb. IRL there are many stories of people risking life and limb to save children, sometimes losing their life. In psychology there is a real...
A story is characters facing a serious problem they must struggle to solve. That is my own definition, though it is simple enough others may have come to the same conclusion. The "plot" flows from...
I would say the central problem in an anti-Messianic story is two-fold; in particular for a known religion like Christianity. First, you need a compelling lie; one that the people want to believe ...
I am a discovery writer, I make 90% of the story up as I go along, so I do what you are doing (inventing background, thoughts, feelings, biases and attitudes, etc) constantly. However, anytime I d...
I wouldn't do it, speaking from experience. I paid for an edit long ago, on my first completed novel, and my editor did not do anything I couldn't have done with spellcheck and Grammarly (both free...
I agree with Mark Baker. If it is a real world acronym everybody knows, just use it. For real-world acronyms few people know, or made up acronyms, a common ploy used in fiction is to use the acrony...
The pragmatic "Hollywood" answer is a film has a happy ending if it leaves room for a sequel. Although Tony Stark dies, they did have sequels with him, and in this particular case, another Iron Man...
