Posts by robertcday
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 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 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 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...
I have been accused — shock, horror — of using the dash (the one that indicates a three-quarters pause) too much in my fiction. Thing is — I quite like the effect (the space inserted in sentences b...
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...
Because I enjoy reading Science Fiction, I'm thinking of writing a Sci-Fi novel myself. I'm interested in 'hard' (related to the engineering sciences) science fiction with a military bent (think Th...
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, ...
Every now and again I think to myself how nice it would be to give up my staid life as a Software Developer and start an exciting new career as a Novelist. But then I think to myself that there ar...
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...
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...
Think action movie. Think two heavily-armed men - one chasing the other over rooftops, down through buildings and into the mean streets of a crowded city. Think big guns, explosions and other loud ...
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 ...
I often have trouble deciding whether (or how often) to take breaks from writing, or to "double down" and try to write, and try to eliminate anything distracting me from that. I am not looking for...
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...
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...
I'm reading The Book of Human Emotions by Tiffany Watt Smith (good stuff if you want to inform the use of emotion in your writing), and I've just come across Overwhelmed (feeling). It talks about t...
