Questions tagged [audience-reaction]
This tag is for questions specifically relating to the interactions between a work of writing and its audience, including asking about how the audience will react to a particular development, how to manipulate audience expectations, or how to elicit a particular emotional reaction in the audience
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How to make a time-constrained story not feel like a laundry list of events?
I am writing a comic, which upon first glance is a survival story about what a forgotten astronaut does to stay alive upon an inhospitable planet. Its first book spans from cycle 0 to cycle 614 with ...
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Keeping your audience after you've guilted them - what's the secret sauce?
Consider that your story has a moral that points to the simple fact that we all have committed and contributed to your protagonist's crisis. The protagonist walks through life desperately needing help,...
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How/where can I get people to tell me their personal reactions to my work?
The book I'm writing is memoir, journalism, social critique, diatribe, autoethnography -- accounts of personal experience, research to help me understand, reflection, analysis of social factors, ...
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When do you have too many plot arcs?
I have a story which could fit nearly any genre and still be engaging, and often times the back cover synopsis likes to brag about multiple elements, like "It has suspense, drama, rib-splitting ...
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Is the bildungsroman dead for contemporary audiences?
My story can't hide the fact that it is bildungsroman, but there really are few linear year-by-year character reveals on the shelves today. Nothing like The Curious Life of Benjamin Button is coming ...
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How can I balance a male character saving his love interest without making the female seem incompetent (and vice versa)?
Stories for many, many years made frequent use of the damsel in distress trope, where female characters are depicted as needing men to save them in big, dramatic displays. People eventually realized ...
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How do I manage audience expectations for a paranormal romance story?
A big part of writing is managing audience expectations, especially as it pertains to the genre. I.e., if a story is pitched as an action-adventure story, people expect a story of fight scenes and ...
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Will readers understand references to Tarot cards?
I have named the members of a group of things in my latest work after the major arcana of Tarot cards. While I can think of a few other works of fiction that do the same thing (the bosses in the House ...
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How do you introduce a new character in later entries of a series?
I had an outline for a book series in which I introduce a new character in one of the later volume to act as an introductory viewpoint character for people who are just picking up the series for the ...
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Writing Science Fantasy: Problems with oversaturation of weird?
I have been thinking of writing a Science Fantasy novel, basically a world with both magic and not currently invented science. I have concerns that it might just have too much fantasy, too much ...
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How do I make a timid, introverted protagonist sympathetic and likable?
People like proactivity and boldness. Indeed, this has been suggested to be why readers are often drawn to charismatic villains over heros, people are more drawn to the proactive, goal-oriented ...
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How do I make a headstrong female character likable and not annoying?
I have a story where one of my lead characters is a headstrong young woman. In terms of personality she is hyperactive, energetic, and charismatic, but at the same time these traits make her arrogant, ...
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