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Iambic pentameter means lines made of five ("penta") feet ("meter"), where each foot is an "iamb", meaning two syllables where the second one is stressed. So the rhythm of iambic pentameter is da-DA d …

Write your story from a moral standpoint, not to a moral standpoint. If you have a strong and clearly articulated set of beliefs, that will naturally come across in your work. But if you try to push …

What makes something feel truly alien and incomprehensible? It's the experience of trying to figure it out and failing. In his masterwork, Dhalgren, Samuel Delany poses a number of puzzles for his m …

This has nothing to do with writing a "perfect" paragraph, or even with your writing skills in general. It is about the specific requirements of your chosen field, academic philosophy --which is a un …

Any writing tool can be helpful or harmful. Campbell's original work was descriptive, not prescriptive. He noted similarities in many of the world's most popular stories --it's only later that people …

Any time you drop a subtle hint, most readers will initially miss it. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It can be fun/gratifying for a reader to initially be blindsided by a development, only to r …

Remember, the goal is not to feel emotion, and not to write emotion. The goal is to write so the reader feels emotion. At the risk of being terminally cheesy, consider these lyrics from 90's pop gro …

It's called foreshadowing and it's common in fiction. Sometimes the future events are just hinted at or suggested (for example, the gun described in the first chapter later becomes the murder weapon) …

For what it is worth, this seems quite effective to me. It is always difficult to write in first person, and when the narrator is challenged in some way, it also challenges the writer. But accepting …

You have made a common mistake about world-building: believing that it all has to go on the page. World-building is for you, the author, to help you craft a story in a setting that feels real and uni …

Could you outline the entire book first, and then write whatever section matches your current mood? I'm assuming you don't want the entire book to all have the same mood and tone, so if your mood a …

I've come to feel that at least half the questions on this site, as different as they are on the surface, all have the same answer: Fully work out all the details of your backstory, richly imagine it …

A "feel-bad tragedy" is either a warning or an elegy. A relatable hero makes some bad choices and these lead to disastrous results. We watch it to learn what not to do in our own lives. Or, the fil …

I think you're taking the wrong lesson from Amadeus' post. There were any number of kids' books about magic schools before Rowling, and the idea of secret conspiracies at the Vatican probably is as ol …

Music is a performance art, it takes place in "real time." Writing does not. So while there is an inevitable trade-off between spontaneity and polish for a musician, the same is not true for a write …