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1500 questions
16
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7 answers

Subverting the emotional woman and stoic man trope

In my post-apocalyptic story, the split of male and female main/supporting characters is 50/50. The girls and women in the story, Eris, Marina, and Ezrith, display very little emotion--Eris represses her emotions so that they only come on rarely…
user34214
16
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9 answers

I feel like most of my characters are the same, what can I do?

If I think about the characters I came up with in my mind so far, I usually get a pretty big list: (Gyvaris (ENTJ), Martha (ENFJ), Adam (INTJ. It's hard to describe that you're constantly seeing dead people from the future), Anon (ISTP) Anon…
Mephistopheles
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Do living authors still get paid royalties for their old work?

Do authors still get paid royalties for their old works? For example, If I decided to buy a copy of the "Odessa File" by Frederick Forsyth or "Kane and Abel" by Jeffery Archer, do the authors get paid royalties for them? Another example would be me…
srini
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6 answers

Should you avoid redundant information after dialogue?

Should we avoid repeating redundant information after a dialogue and is there a way around this? Sometimes, you feel prompted to write the description of an action that follows a line, but that also seems to be redundant, and it leads to some pretty…
Sayaman
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16
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6 answers

How important is it for multiple POVs to run chronologically?

The way I am currently designing a story with three distinct POVs. An issue I am running into, however, is that one of these has much more to do in the first third than the other two while having less to do later. Because of this, I am considering…
Weckar E.
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9 answers

Is it bad to suddenly introduce another element to your fantasy world a good ways into the story?

I'm writing a novel with many POVs, and this is a very flexible story. It started out with a few POVs who had one plot, and now there is a lot more, having been integrated in between those previously existing POVs. But now I'm thinking about adding…
A. Kvåle
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3 answers

What is the art of designing names?

If you read names from popular novels you feel like the names define characters. They fit perfectly to the personality of character. For an e.g. Harry Potter, Robert Langdon, Jason Bourne, etc. I have a character who is a professor of psychology, is…
The White Cloud
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3 answers

Does every chapter have to "blow the reader away" so to speak?

I amended some of my chapters so that they're more intriguing and engaging for my readers. But there's one particular chapter in which one of my beta-readers stated, "It's intriguing, but it doesn't blow me away like the first two chapters did,"
Dawn Kelli
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5 answers

How to make a setting relevant?

One piece of feedback that I got on a story I wrote is that my settings feel irrelevant, or that the entire book could have been a phone call. I am not sure how to go about fixing this. The characters, for example, are in an office, or a restaurant,…
mprogrammer
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5 answers

How to write a vulnerable moment without it seeming cliche or mushy?

So, I have a kinda loudmouthed character who's always the first to fight and first to go on the offensive (This is a fantasy, so she fights a lot.) But, later in the story, she comes across someone she truly fears, and finds that she must fight that…
Kale Slade
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16
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5 answers

What weight should be given to writers groups critiques?

I joined a writers group that meets every three weeks. I submitted the first eighteen pages of my work and also sent the same file to a publisher at AuthorHouse. The writers group had varied opinions including I need more identifiers because the…
Rasdashan
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Are wands in any sort of book going to be too much like Harry Potter?

I am trying to write a magical system, and I love the way that wands are like gunfire and how you flick and attack and it's instant. No weird hand movements or long unwieldy staffs or canes to use. But I'm stuck at the Harry Potter series, as I…
John155jd
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9 answers

How to compactly explain secondary and tertiary characters without resorting to stereotypes?

Sure, I understand the characters, but that's because I've been thinking about them. But how do I transfer that knowledge to the reader without taking the time and space to flesh them out further?? The standard answer is "stereotypes", because…
RonJohn
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Should I use acronyms in dialogues before telling the readers what it stands for in fiction?

There are occasions where you basically just start a chapter with a short descriptive passage and go straight to dialogues, so in those situations I am not sure how to deal with acronyms in dialogues. As Mike settled down for work, he noticed a…
Sayaman
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4 answers

Can we "borrow" our answers to populate our own websites?

Second Edit -- to try to expand the scope BEYOND W.SE and to cover any CreativeCommons work, not just here. Deleted part about the badges. -- Edit -- to clarify it's not quite a BLOG, more a portfolio of teaching resources I've developed. My…
April Salutes Monica C.
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