Posts by Amadeus
I suppose one alternative is to play it as you yourself found the problem: Start your detective out as a great detective but a novice occult detective, that just stumbled into the whole occult side...
Those are two different questions! Yes, stories get rejected because the stories are not appealing enough. No, if the writing is bad, the story premise probably doesn't matter, the writing will b...
It is not redundant. You are providing information about the structure of your presentation to come, making a promise to discuss all of the possible classes of "a response". Such promises are recom...
You can talk about you. This is a sales letter trick, often used in manuals as well. Make all your "narrative" lines as "you," (the reader), or some equivalent. I will also try to show that t...
I am confused here of whether I should describe each and every character with detail for readers to understand that character's norms, habits, beliefs and nature? Do not do that. All that mat...
As the others have said; you are doing too much telling. As a rule of thumb; don't impart information about the character or environment if it is something they would not be thinking about at the t...
Spoilers ARE a modern concept. Even as recently as the pre-Industrial revolution; the early 1700's, social life was radically different than what you are accustomed to. I'm not talking about any Pu...
You have your trope (The Scrappy) wrong; the trope you are looking for is called Good Is Not Nice. The Scrappy is disliked and stays disliked and does nothing to redeem himself from being disliked...
Insight. Or, if you're so smart --- Prove It! I think you misunderstand intelligent people, and I wouldn't rely on vocabulary to indicate it in the first place. I am a professor in a university, ...
One mistake early writers make, is writing to directly influence the reader. The minute I say this, the retort is Isn't that the whole point? Yes, but influencing the reader is not the kind of th...
I would say, in plain English, a "method" is an approach to accomplishing something without any guarantee of success. An "algorithm" implies greater accuracy, dealing with well-defined and consist...
Movies and books are different mediums. With a skillfully engineered scene, a movie director can deliver enormous amounts of information in seconds; a 30 second chase scene tells us all we need to ...
Are their any ramifications of characters reading real books, following real blogs, and using real websites? Could I get into copyright trouble? I am not a lawyer, and this is a question for l...
With others, I cannot even be sure what the "take away message" is supposed to be. "took length to" does not make sense. "length" is a form of measurement, applied to an argument, "length" implies ...
Discovery Write. Discovery writing doesn't require a plot, exactly. It does require a problem, undesirable situation, or confrontation to get started; all of these are under the banner of "conflic...
Your answer is given by your first trope link; on DIAA, perhaps you have misunderstood it! The protagonist is incredibly self-centered, an existential nihilist Then why should the reader ca...
To me a good resurrection is a good plot twist, meaning the reader could go back and re-read what went before, and see it in a new light and realize the clues for the resurrection were there, they ...
I would say, you don't get off on a technicality when it comes to readers, so whether you are explicit in telling them it is scifi, or aliens are spaceships or super-high-tech, is all immaterial. ...
I am not sure what "under what circumstances..." is supposed to mean. Whenever you want! IRL violent psychopaths are perhaps 0.1% of the population, one in 1000. With about 3 billion adults on t...
Steal it! For a ritual setting, the poetry is plausibly old stuff, so find some very old poetry in the public domain, and look for passages you can steal. You don't have to attribute it to anybody...
What are the consequences if you ignore these requests? If there are no consequences, add a filter to your email and divert them to the spam folder.
So, does visualization form intuitions, or do intuitions lead to visualization, and which is better? Yes! From my study of biologically informed AI and neurology, I actually think the answer ...
Do not post online as you write it; even most professional writers do not like their first drafts, and IMO a beginner should never like their first draft, so you are just inviting criticism of some...
I look for resonance, with the rest of the story, and I do my best to see what the reader will expect, and deliver that. I have mentioned in other answers I am a discovery writer, but I keep my en...
Inner monologue is used quite frequently, and it can reveal character traits that may not be revealed any other way: True feelings. Such as, if Jack is telling the truth about never cheating on Ji...
