Posts by Amadeus
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...
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...
There are free academic studies to help you learn about the *diffusion of science into common use, both for scientific communities and the public. See, for example, The Diffusion of Scientific Inno...
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 ...
You are not foreshadowing correctly; they cannot be unrelated to the story currently happening. For example, you can foreshadow the more experienced Bill getting killed before the novice Charlie w...
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...
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. ...
Something irrevocable transpires. I would say a decision is made when something irrevocable occurs. Words are spoken and heard, a button is pushed, a trigger is pulled, a letter is mailed, an emai...
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 ...
Speaking as a professor and author of several academic papers; I would avoid it. Rhetorical questions are a technique we use in classrooms to generate interest or debate among students. That is a...
Yes, you can, it is done often, and I see nothing wrong with them. Authors often spend years on a book, and it is normal human nature to thank the people that helped you through it. People don't h...
The OP (now) specifies the narrator cannot know the thoughts of any character, including the villain (see question comments). Human logic, both formal and informal, is grounded in self-evident tru...
Killing a character and killing the protagonist are two very different things. The death of somebody close to a character is obviously life-changing and can set them on a new course. It is the dea...
