Posts by Amadeus
How can a creation of your mind (a character) do something that you don't imagine? Implications. I will explain! What I imagine when designing my characters is scenes, things they have done in t...
For me, time-tested and formulaic are equivalent; and equate to a lack of surprises, at least for a jaded consumer of fiction. I am a jaded consumer of Television entertainment. I know the formul...
Basically you have to use obvious body language. If you have only 90 seconds, I wouldn't try for much drama, and friendship might be more difficult than something stronger, like love or dislike or ...
My approach to that is, for letters to the POV character, do not forget that you have a human reading. Mechanically, I indent the letter like a quote. (Say your normal margins are 1-inch left, 1-i...
Stakes come down to emotions, your characters need to have emotions or perhaps in the case of scifi machine characters, something that replaces emotion as a motivating force. +1 Mark Baker, yes th...
I believe you show, don't tell. This comes down to the design of the personalities involved. The older guy is the big problem. The boys in school can be just unaware of the law, or think (as many...
I definitely think it can be "too diverse", because ticking every box in the diversity matrix may feel forced and distract from the story itself. Diversity should not be gratuitous. If the story i...
I would make A grow with the times. If he can see premonitions of his own future, and knows they can be changed, he can see that his freak outs are going to leave him without friends in the near fu...
In addition to Galastel's answer, I would add the non-writing worry: People that know you, including your brother and family and possibly friends, may read your book and recognize you, themselves, ...
+1 @Kris: ACTUALLY, it appears "Grok" is a middle ages version of "Greek" referring to the Greek Language. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22grok%22&tbm=bks&tbs=cdr:1,cdmin:1680,cdmax:169...
This is an existing answer of mine; which I believe is on-point. https://writing.codidact.com/questions/36209#answer-36211 Basically: Falling in love is generally a combination of sexual attracti...
I would find this approach highly unrealistic. For one, those reel-to-reel tape drives do not EVER record sound; they are strictly digital. I worked with them extensively in the 1970's; for a time ...
I don't like reading made up languages, I'm going to skip over them anyway. So I seldom write more than a word. My approach is to keep the POV character thinking and analyzing what she can, which ...
+1 Mark, Galastel. The one thing I would add is structural. Don't forget that the first 15% of a book, before the Inciting Incident (that introduces the major problem), is where the reader expects ...
I imagine, as Lauren says, you need simple sentences, but they don't have to be boring. Xiao Li lost his trousers. He politely asked his manager if he could return home for more trousers. His man...
I am a "pantser", or as we PREFER to be called, a Discovery Writer. So is Stephen King. I typically begin a story without knowing the ending, or the plot, or all of the characters. What I do have...
I have never tried for a group, for some of the "downside" reasons DPT outlined. I have found readers that enjoy my work, and aren't writers but avid fiction consumers. My rule for critique is basi...
I'll offer a frame challenge here. Personally, I embrace the rewrite, and the deletion. I recently finished a long novel, a year-long project, and by my count, I read the whole thing twenty times. ...
Another answer (in addition to my old answer): One approach is that your agent/publisher is going to want to know what other book yours is like, specifically "This book will appeal to readers of Th...
I'd say if they (Q) were closed before, open them and give them a downvote, and if they get "enough" downvotes (3? 5?) close them. I would like the same for both Q and A. SE had a "review queue", o...
I would write around it this way: Original: When the user requests for their visit and order to be registered in their account, a checkin is created at POS. Sounds awkward to me. Presuming POS me...
Yes, you can have both. In the Fugitive 1993 film Tommy Lee Jones is a Federal Marshall pursuing wrongly-convicted Harrison Ford, and Tommy Lee is pulling out every legal trick he can to catch Harr...
Hi Mark; I had a similar observation; I proposed a new tab with some daily "random questions" from the archive, which we might be able to review and answer (or at least upvote Qs and As). We've got...
I notice we have a dearth of activity on this site. With a relatively small number of active users, perhaps we can add a tab to the "Questions" Page. We have Activity, Age, Score as sorting algori...
I"ve actually just written a scene in a novel, in which a recent stroke victim slurs her speech. But I don't try for "realism" in this, I write her dialogue straight; but the characters she is talk...
