New answers tagged fiction
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Don't feel bad about recording the flaws of anyone, whether yourself or someone else. Remember that the center of every story is a person who needs to change.
Don't let your desire for anonymity bother you, either. You can still publish your work, as long as you change the names of the characters, and publish under a pseudonym if you don't want to answer ...
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Ah, the dilemma: How to get in touch with your private thoughts and feelings without hurting others or exposing yourself to hurt?
It's likely that, if you keep private writings around, someone will eventually read them. Your knowledge of this limits you from being honest and expressive while you're writing.
The simple solution, and one practiced by many ...
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I have a similar / the same problem, and won’t pretend I got over it, but it got better.
What helped me was to keep telling myself, that no one would ever read what I wrote, unless I gave it to them. Even though I knew this from the start, the act of repeating it helped. If I got stuck on a part I was hesitant to write, I would tell myself again ‘This will ...
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Any tips for getting over this hurdle and either skipping over autobiographical writing or making it mentally/emotionally easier?
If writing about your life is therapeutic, do it. Buy a small notebook, write with a pencil and keep an eraser nearby in case you need to walk back your words. Keep it locked away in a safe or drawer when you're not writing so ...
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I think about how people who are involved or who know me would react if they ever got the chance to read it.
There is one easy way past this block - write so you would be happy with the writing if they read it. If someone made a terrible decision, e.g. robbing a bank, and you want to portray this nicely, then do so. Explain the hunger they feel, the need ...
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Everyone has regrets. Try writing how your life would have changed if you had taken a different choice, such as telling someone you had a crush on them. Would your life be happier, or you could even try what if I did this and my life got messed up. So while you are still writing about yourself, you are not writing what really happened.
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Should I story board/outline the novel and hand it over to a ghost writer directly to write from scratch?
Or should I write a "bad" first draft and hire an editor to rewrite it, ideally in a more compelling manner.
That rumble in the distance is the sound of a thousand plotters and pantsers, marching towards this thread to wage war on each other.
...
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Writing for the screen is not the same as writing a novel. However, there are many similarities. For example, you have to be prepared actually write rather than just talk about it, you have to edit what you have written, dialogue has to sound realistic, characters have to be three-dimensional, there has to be conflict, etc.
If I was you, I would start with ...
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My advice? Take the plunge, and do the best that you can. Don't assume that because you're used to writing scripts that you can't layer in the description. Just picture in your head the scene and describe it. Then, higher a developmental or someone else to help fix it. Don't send it to a ghost writer.
I've written with quite a bit of economy of description, ...
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At heart this is a worldbuilding question. What shape the conflict takes depends on a number of setting and motivation related factors.
For instance, who are these foreigners? Are they explorers, looking for gold in a distant land, and are they the first people to make contact with this tribe? Exploration missions are expensive and dangerous. If a member of ...
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Not all advice is equally helpful to all writers. Some pieces of advice aren't even equally helpful to the same writer during different stages of the writing process. Like using a satnav, always exercise judgment before blindly yanking the wheel and driving into the nearest lake because a disembodied voice told you to.
That said, I think both bullet points ...
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If someone else did it well, I shouldn't write it
This statement is very easily disproven - by looking at pretty much any mainstream genre. For example, the fantasy genre contains many different good books - LOTR, Mistborn, etc. Some people might begin writing a fantasy novel and then say "Tolkien and Sanderson did it well - what's the point?" I ...
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There seem to be many different ways that the conflict could work. These are my examples:
Methods
War - all-out battle, think crusades and religious persecution - kill all the heretics and convert their children
Missionary activity - think Christian missionaries or the Jewish Chabad movement.
Force - pushing the elders and leaders into teaching the young/...
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Consider the pace of the fight, and compare with the pace of the reading. In a slow, lumbering slug-fest, you might have time to describe every blow. By contrast, I can punch you 3 times and kick you twice, all in less than 2 seconds. And, by the standards of international Martial Arts tournaments, that's slow (hence why I've never taken better than ...
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This is a complex question and it deserves a full answer, so I'll break my answer into two parts: how to write an interesting fight scene and how to specifically explain why a character wouldn't make optimal moves in a fight.
How to write an interesting fight scene
The best advice I have ever received about writing interesting and exciting fight scenes that ...
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Description is always a game of point of view. Even if you are doing 3rd person narration, you want to pick a point of view character for this action. Then, don't describe this like a sports announcer sitting on the sidelines. Instead, try to see it as your character would. They wouldn't take in everything, so give us what they would actually notice, and ...
answered Jun 22 at 21:00
Chris Sunami supports Monica
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The way I've heard it said is as follows...
Only show blows that are important. Gloss over unimportant parts of the fight with generalized dialogue because it doesn't provide any useful information to the reader.
Focus on events which show reversal of the situation. One party or another gets the upper hand, the fight escalates, there is a significant change ...
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I believe this may be a duplicate, but I'll try answering.
1. Is repeating a scene through a second POV advisable?
I think that that is the whole point, reinterpreting the same event with new eyes...
Though to avoid boring the reader it does need to be distinctive and preferably adding new elements that the original pov character didn't see like something ...
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How important is the sentence is your narrative? If not very important, then "everyone poured into the streets." Bad on you if you haven't set up the reader to understand that "everyone" refers to those of all species. If it is important, and this is perhaps the first time you are showing eqivalence amongst the species, then maybe ...
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Think first about the country you want your city to be in. Then find out who the first people were that discovered your country. Let's say you want to name a city in Britain. The first people there were the Romans. Think about what the Romans could find special in your city. Maybe there were, I don't know, many bears as they arrived. So you take the Latin ...
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how about "a horde of people of many different species", or "A dense crowd with members of all six species who lived in the city".
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Here are three possible answers, from the biggest intervention to the smallest, depending on what the underlying issue is:
Maybe you aren't interested in people. That isn't an accusation. But we all write best the things we love best. Sometimes, in order to address our weaknesses as writers, we first have to address our weaknesses as observers. I used to be ...
answered Jun 12 at 18:49
Chris Sunami supports Monica
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Use a general word that includes them all. "A wave of creatures", "a wave of beings", etc. If it's necessary to identify the creatures, be more specific. "A wave of creatures from almost every species of land animal on Earth ..." Or "A wave of beings from every planet in the Orion arm of the galaxy ..." or whatever.
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You'll have to answer some questions.
What species are there?
How many?
What do they look like?
If the species look similar, you can use similar words. It also depends on the species' name. For example, "humanity" comes from "human." If you named a species "Roax" (I just made that up, it's not from a certain place), than you could call it "Roanity," or "...
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If you are revealing new facts by using a different POV, then sure, use it. Many works of fiction use that approach for big plot twists or reveals.
As far as particular techniques are involved, make sure the reader understands which POV is used. If all of your book up to the point is written from a single POV, and then you do the switch, it indeed may be ...
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You can take a philosopher you agree with, turn them into a character, and build them a thorough backstory. Such a character will be "fleshed out, deep thinking," and you'll "understand them well"—
—none of which makes them interesting to read or write about. Kant was certainly deep-thinking, but given his clockwork nature, I would not love reading about ...
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Sounds like you need a new character to me.
What I would do would be revisit the worldbuilding and look for something that would cause a deep issue for some character, and reinvent a story about that character.
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You and your readers will only care about your story if it contains a character who is instrumental in protecting or shaping this world:
Bring a disruptive force to bear down upon on your planet or your character's personal life. (Conflict)
Give your character the primary role in shaping the outcome of this disruption. (Protagonist)
Give another character ...
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how can I show that twenty years have past?
Since you're only intending on using the +20 years time period as a framing device to show the importance of the story to the character keep the "future" segments focussed as much as possible on the character rather than the future setting itself. Ideally you'd show only that which is explicitly necessary or ...
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I think you may be misunderstanding the complaints about "telling someone else's story". Every story is the story of someone other than the author, in whole or in part. The complaints come when:
The author takes a writing spot from someone closer to the experience. For example, people would complain if a white writer pitched a story with a black main ...
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