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I would hide the basement but not the locked door. A coded padlock on a door inside a house is really weird, and the sort of thing someone would notice and probably comment on. If the MC has a guest …

How do you know what the sparrows are thinking? I mean that sincerely. If you're watching them, you attribute dialogue to them because they're obviously communicating things to each other. They jus …

The short answer is: you live. You gain experience over time. Some things you'll never experience and some you already have. Knowing a drug addict is still personal experience, it's just from a dif …

Noticing it is the first step. Your line: “I- I thought I was being polite,” he mumbled. is enough. You don't need to say the prince looked abashed. You are already conveying his uncertainty and co …

In theater it refers to naturalism, while in literary parlance it is a narrative technique in which a seemingly arbitrary sequence of events in a character's life is presented, often lacking plot …

Who is telling this backstory? Is it a separate section, set apart from the rest of the book? Or does the narrator tell the story? It's fine to use first person for an entire novel, or for a piece …

Something is very off about this being, and everyone knows it. Except it's not. When someone is very off, people steer clear. The creepy guy who hangs out in front of the supermarket makes his …

Tell it in narration. You have plenty of opportunity to show this character's social pathology in her adult life. And plenty of material to do it with. This establishes her personality and the leng …

Write the length you need to tell your story. If it turns out to be a short story or a novella, so be it. Instead of taking longer to tell the story, maybe what you need is to tell a story that sp …

This is something you need to be careful with. In popular Western culture, going back decades or further, jealousy is often seen as a positive trait. "His jealousy proves he loves me so much." Espe …

Skipping scenes is usually quite welcome in a novel. Sometimes you don't want to see every step. But the amount of skipping you propose is pretty jarring. You will break your readers out of their i …

The main difference is the ability to be published. To break into TV, you need to live somewhere that produces a lot of TV shows (in the United States, you'd move to Los Angeles and try to hang out w …

I have 25-30 "main characters," (feel free to quibble over the definition) and more supporting ones, though of course only a few are really central. Two of the main 5 characters I don't even introduc …

It's okay to have a Blue Period. Picasso's lasted 4 years and was fueled by depression. He produced amazing paintings during this time and it was something he felt compelled to do. It's making m …

It's all about context and the full portrayal of the characters and culture. My daughter's ballet teacher is a 90 year old woman. Short to begin with, she's shrunk to under 5 feet. Thin and frail, y …