Posts by robertcday
One of my bugbears about writing is the editing process. I'd much rather get it right first time, rather than chop this and change that afterwards. Other industries would not tolerate the rather c...
I sometime express my personality too much in my more creative fiction. When I get going, I include slang words and phrases that sound fascinating and are comprehensible to me, but may not be inter...
If a newspaper/magazine were to receive information relating about a crime committed by a member of the public and are considering publishing this information, then the section on Privacy in the BB...
I struggle with metaphors. My attempts are either so wild that no-one understands them, so lame that they break down really easily or so normal that they are indistinguishable from cliché. I read ...
I heard an ingenious little explanation for why characters always seem to have either a best friend or many strong friends around them. This applies primarily to movies or TV shows but also to book...
I have experience of a similar situation - not Chinese or Korean, but Indian. I married into a family that has Indian ancestry but now live in the Caribbean and in addition I have a large number of...
Yes - everything in the brackets is redundant. If you were to omit '(we will come to that later)' then the sentence would still have the same effect on the reader's mind - that of making a promise ...
If you feel that choosing an opening is the only obstacle to writing a story that will just flow quickly and easily once you have done it, then just write some placeholder text and move onward with...
Just by coincidence I starting reading a book this morning that could be of interest to you: The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. I'm only on the first chapter, but it seems to speak to your sit...
If the book is readable, flows well, and gets the point across, but you can tell that the writer is non native, and the reader is interested in the authentic experience and story of such a writer, ...
You can make your tale less similar by changing the characters, plot, location and/or theme but please don't. The world needs more Harry Potter (HP) type books where good triumphs over evil over a ...
It's essential that you tell us more about the characters or the context in order for us (as readers) to know who to cheer for. Consider a scene ripped from the middle of a(ny) Wolverine story. If...
I've written many stories and have received some good feedback but have never tried to compete with others. I've been thinking recently that it would be nice to enter a piece of my flash-fiction in...
The classic approach is to go into the events leading up to the volcano eruption via a 'one year (moth/week/day/hour) earlier' chapter. Make sure that you are not merely describing the events but ...
Fan fiction is fiction about characters or settings from an original work of fiction, created by fans of that work rather than by its creator. Therefore, so long as you steer away from using the s...
Think what you would do the other way around. If the entire book were in Mandarin Chinese and you had an English speaking character - would you print their English in Latin-based script, it would y...
Two things: There is a term in Philosophy called Fallacy Philosophers and Creative Writers don't always see eye to eye. To address the first matter: I'm not a professional philosopher, but I'm ...
It's a simple fact the there are more fiction books in existence now than one person could possibly read in a lifetime. Add to this the supposition that all plots, themes and genres have been thoro...
my name is Robert and I'm an Beta Reader. This answer is based on my experience. I started cataloguing my books (the ones I owned and those I intended to read) on Goodreads in 2013. Since then I h...
I kissed a close friend of my wife by mistake last year. She was mortified and I must admit that I had mixed feelings of amusement and embarrassment too. But wait - before you go running to tell my...
In 2015 I wrote the first two thirds of a novel (as part of NaNoWriMo). I stopped at that point because I had written the 50,000 words required for the 'competition' but the story is not yet comple...
I'm writing a novel about an obsessive character who is bothering the people around him but just will not or cannot accept that a change must come. When is the most effective time (or if not - the...
I read The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker (yes, it was so heavy that I had to cut into two books just to be able to carry it around) and I just can't believe that the number of plots we ha...
I've just read a tutorial about scenic techniques in novel-writing that recommends that a story should have a rhythm of static scenes and dramatic scenes. Here's an excerpt: Dramatic scenes are...
