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1500 questions
14
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7 answers
Arousing Emotion in Readers
Last Christmas my sister bought me a tome called The Book of Human Emotions (by Tiffany Watt Smith). I just started reading it and it got me thinking about how a writer might arouse emotion in a reader (and not in terms of provoking them to throw…
robertcday
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Dealing with inability to sustain interest in an idea
I frequently have the problem of starting a story with an idea—either one recently conceived or one held in mind for months, even years—only to find it bland or boring after a day or so and abandoning it.
I have developed two partially effective…
user289661
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How to create space
Recently, a few snippets of my fiction have received critiques along the lines of 'Does not give a sense of space'. Or 'needs more description, sights and sounds'.
I think where I am going wrong is that in any given scene I am focusing too hard on…
M.A
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Breaking up a talky piece of writing
Dialogue is my favorite thing to write. I tend to use a lot of dialogue in my writing, which sometimes results in long, talky passages -- a bit similar to this question about breaking up exposition. The dialogue I'm talking about isn't necessarily…
Chris Sunami
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14
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Do Short Stories Need Definitive Endings?
I'm looking to create a few short stories that are in a shared universe of sorts and I'm curious whether or not I need to have a definitive ending to a story. I'm thinking that the "end" would be more of a cliffhanger or something along the lines of…
Dylan Beck
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What new plots are available to writers?
I read The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker (yes, it was so heavy that I had to cut into two books just to be able to carry it around) and I just can't believe that the number of plots we have available to us has been set in stone and never…
robertcday
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Why is character lifetime proportional to character development so often?
Hollywood movies are a good example of this, but also many books feature the rule.
When the plot revolves around life and death situations, the first to die are the characters with least development. Those are the Non Player Characters in role…
Vorac
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What are methods to refer to something that happened but did not make it onto the page?
As writers we're supposed to know more about our stories than the words that make it onto the page. Can a character refer to something that happened, but happened off-page? As the writer, I know that it in fact happened, and there's nothing to…
SFWriter
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What are the limits to description in story writing? How do I know if I have crossed them?
Time and time again, I have been told that my unfounded focus on description distracts from the main story line.
I mostly write stories in English, which doesn't happen to be my first language but I'm fairly good in it. My native tongue is a very…
Soha Farhin Pine
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How to prevent seeming like a Marty Stu-ish villain is cheating?
In a story I'm writing, there's a villain who is a genius strategist that can get anything he wants, whatever it is, by developing perfect strategies that can have only two possible outcomes: 1, success, or 2, success. His plans never fail because…
Yuuza
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Should I write scared?
Is it better to push yourself in your writing? To attempt bigger and deeper stories than you've done before? K.M. Weiland says so. But then there's this thread (which is talking about music performance, yes), which implies that the only way to…
icanfathom
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How to avoid using "he/she/it" repetitively in action
I'm writing a zombie apocalypse genre book (yes, I know it's a heavily used and abused writing genre, but I'm writing it in my way, a way I believe is a good way). Anyway, I caught myself writing "he and/or Will" one too many times in the beginning…
A. Kvåle
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14
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10 answers
Where's the middle ground between genre conventions and originality?
I've long been interested in writing a fantasy novel. Over the countless iterations I've gone through, one thing has remained clear: a quest for originality.
I know some people like the fantasy cliches, but a good chunk don't. These people want…
Thomas Reinstate Monica Myron
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Best e-book formatting process?
The question I would like to ask is this: does anyone else have their own process (or one borrowed from elsewhere) that they use for formatting and then creating their e-books? Are you using other software tools besides Calibre to create your e-book…
Steven Drennon
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6 answers
Should I repeat character descriptions if a character reappears the second time too far into the story?
Should I repeat character descriptions if a minor character reappears the second time too far into the story?
For example, I have a minor character who is introduced and has a bit of involvement at the start of the novel, but comes back in the third…
Klara Raškaj
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